


Eagle Nine

by Isis



Category: Eagle of the Ninth - Rosemary Sutcliff, The Eagle | Eagle of the Ninth (2011)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Future, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Cyborgs, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-18
Updated: 2013-01-23
Packaged: 2017-11-10 06:14:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 36,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/463118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Isis/pseuds/Isis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Out here we had always got by with minimum mods:  a cutting module and the standard utility circuits, plus a few weapons and defenses.  Nothing big, just what you'd need to take out a wolfry or keep a raider from getting you. And then the fuckers came out of the sky, decked from eyes to toes – and the real joke was that they acted like they thought <i>they</i> were the human ones.  Romebots, we called them.</p>
<p>Science fiction futuristic cyborg AU remix of <i>The Eagle</i>/<i>Eagle of the Ninth</i>, movie/book fusion.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Part of Rome

**Author's Note:**

> Written for round 3 of the ninth_eagle Fanmedia Challenge, inspired by [this photograph](http://i1181.photobucket.com/albums/x424/riventhorn/Eagle/goslarwarrior.jpg) of (and [this information about](http://www.henry-moore.org/works-in-public/world/canary-islands/tenerife-santa-cruz/santa-cruz/goslar-warrior-1973-74-lh-641)) the sculpture Goslar Warrior by Henry Moore. Thanks to altri_uccelli, boxofdelights, and riverlight for their helpful comments and suggestions.
> 
> Note: there is discussion of (offscreen) amputation of limbs, and onscreen forcible removal of prostheses. There is also a lot of violence in a science-fictiony context.

The soldiers grabbed me just outside C-town and hit me with a disruptor before I could show them my pass. Which didn't really matter, since the pass was a forgery. But if I'd only known, I could have kept the clock circuit I'd traded off for it – not that I cared what time it was, but I didn't have a lot of mods I could spare. It had been hard to give it up, knowing I was going to need all the bargaining power I had to get operational and out to the edge colonies. Of course, it didn't matter now that they had me. Nothing mattered now. They'd take me back to the mines, and all my planning and trading and scheming was worthless. Just like what would be left of my life.

I lay there like a heap of scrap metal while they buzzed over my systems. That was the real pisser about disruptors, that they didn't mess with your sensory circuits, so you got to see, hear, and feel everything, but you couldn't do jack about it.

The big one cocked his head; he was receiving a transmission, and I could see the moment the word came back from Central, because he grinned at the two others. "Escaped mine-slave, just like I told you." Something flashed across his screen. The confirmation codes from Central, I guessed. 

One of the others made a face. "Remind me not to bet against you again."

"You shouldn't bet your good mods. But you can wait to take it out until we get to the city."

I wondered what he'd bet: a weapons circuit, probably. These guys were loaded down with all their spoils, beams and disruptors and probably a couple of blasters or two, all high Q but nothing they couldn't afford to lose. But that was Rome for you. They'd built their empire on the best cyborg soldiers money could buy, back in the Tech Age, and even after everything went to shit, they still had most of the toys. And you know what they say about the ones with the most toys.

Out here we had always got by with minimum mods. We were just farmers and builders. Nobody needed anything more than a cutting module and the standard utility circuits, plus a few weapons and defenses. Nothing big, just what you'd need to take out a wolfry or keep a raider from getting you. And then the fuckers came out of the sky, decked from eyes to toes – and the real joke was that they acted like they thought _they_ were the human ones. Romebots, we called them. Maybe they were cyborgs once, but if there was anything human left to them it was hidden under mods and metal.

Me, I was still probably sixty percent flesh, but that was because when my clan was taken by Romebots I was on a trading trip. I didn't get parted out, sure, but I also didn't get the mods that were supposed to have come to me when Cunoval went black. I was his heir, so I'd have had the first pick plus the heir's portion – and he was the clan chief, so his mods were the best we had. 

But it didn't work out that way. There'd been a fight, and our clan lost, big-time. When I came back from the trading trip, they had been parted out and I was solo, with only my own metal to defend me, and that made me easy pickings when the slavers came through looking for fresh goods. I was in the pit before I even knew what had hit me, my weapons and shields disabled and my optic enhance gone. That had been my best mod that could be taken easy, and the slavers had known it.

The soldiers slapped a lifter on me and hauled me down the road. They had a whole bunch of other local Brigs disrupted and lifted; I couldn't turn my head but it looked like three or four, at least. Nobody I knew, or at least that I could identify right off. But I didn't know anybody anymore, not after two years in the mines.

When we headed towards the city walls instead of back out toward the mines, I figured they were looking for more Brigs to haul in, or maybe heading for an official to turn us in for their percentage. I wondered what they'd take from me. I didn't think they'd be granted both legs, and one by itself wouldn't be useful; and anyway, if they took them, I'd be worthless in the mines unless they had something to swap in. All their weapons were way higher Q than anything on me. The only sensory enhance I had left now that my optic was gone was an aural, and it was pretty good – I could hear a wolfry half a klick away – but I'd bet they had better ones. 

But when we came to a stop, I realized they hadn't taken us to the government blocks. A chill went down my skell as I recognized the huge stone building in front of us. Shit. I knew that building, although I'd never gone in it. I'd never wanted to go in it. It was a Romebot thing; a place we Brigs stayed away from, and for good reason. 

They'd taken us to the Arena.

They dumped us in a holding cell and turned a regulator on the lot of us. As soon as my systems came online I was up, back to the wall, eyeing the other prisoners warily. They regarded me the same way, of course.

"Don't waste your juice," one rasped. He was a big guy with only one arm; and I don't mean only one module, I mean, there wasn't even anything organic there. I could see the plug where the mod had been, but the edges were crusted over like it had been a long time. "Everyone's offensive mods have been disabled. They don't want us to fight until they can sell tickets."

I wondered how he knew; who he had been before the soldiers had taken him. He wasn't a Brig, not with his height. Probably from one of the other rocks that Rome had taken over. He wouldn't have been a mine-slave, not with only one arm. Normally when the slavers took a major part for their percentage they swapped it out for something basic and low-Q, they didn't just take it off. Maybe he'd fought in the Arena before, and lost, and the winner had claimed his arm. 

He must have seen the question in my eyes, because he spat on the ground between us and shrugged. "I was a body-slave to an official. I came with him to the Games a few times."

Body-slave, well. That could mean anything from a house-servant to a sex toy. I jerked my chin towards the empty plug at his shoulder. "How did you lose it?"

"His mod went blinky, so he took mine. Said he'd get me something from the yards to make up for it, but he never did. I think he liked watching me struggle to do things this way. Nothing I could do about it until he went black."

"You wouldn't be allowed to part him out, not an official," I said.

He laughed, but there was no mirth in it. "I tried anyway."

And that was why he was here, of course. That was why we were all here; for crimes against Rome, which for us Brigs meant just daring to exist. Sometimes I wondered why they hadn't just parted us all out; but of course then they wouldn't have the use of our labor. Or be able to watch the spectacle of us fighting it out in the Arena for the promise of a percentage.

* * *

So there I was some days later, fighting it out in the Arena for the promise of a percentage. I had almost forgotten how glorious it felt to have all my systems back on. And I even got to enjoy it for what was probably three whole seconds – just a guess, since my clock circuit was now being used by a mine guard – before getting tossed onto the sand in front of a crowd of cheering, screaming Romebots. 

"Don't bother. There's a shield at the edge of the stands. You can't touch them."

It was the one-armed man. Except he wasn't any more; now he had a gleaming mod extending from his shoulder, something with a weapon in it – I could see the nozzle – but I couldn't tell what. He held it up, looking at it almost lovingly. "They put me up against a real softie. No skell at all. What do you think of my percentage?"

He extended it towards me, and I threw up my shield and ran. I heard him laughing behind me as he came for me.

I had done a lot of hunting and a little raiding before I was taken for the mines, and I knew how to run, how to dodge a beast or a beam. I had enough juice to keep my shield up for a while. If I could put some distance between us I could hit him with my beam; I should have shot him earlier, but I was still a little woozy from the disruptor they'd hit me with to put me out while they turned my systems back on.

And running was what I was good at. That was my best mod, my legs. They'd come down through the clan, real high Q stuff from the height of the Tech Age. Cunoval had inherited them from the previous chief, but he had just kept them in storage, and when I was old enough that the clan could see my hunting skill, everyone had agreed I should get them, if I wanted. And I wanted. 

Of course it wouldn't be like a clock circuit or a wrist shooter. The leg mods came with a serious price, and the clan made sure I knew it before I said yes. They weren't just clamp-ons, they were true cybermods; a couple of years and they'd be so integrated with my own skell that if anyone took them, the flesh would come with the metal. It had been longer than that, long enough that the mods were a part of me now.

So I ran. Which would have been a great choice out in the open, but the Arena floor wasn't all that big, which limited my advantage. Still, I got some distance between us, zig-zagging so he couldn't hit me with anything; then I whirled and shot my beam at him. His shield glowed, catching the power. It was a good one. His arm went up – his old one, not the shiny one. It was still mostly organic with a few weapons circuits along the forearm, and I dodged as something shimmery splashed in my direction.

My shield wasn't as good as his, so I felt the backwash of power and the stuttering of circuits as some of the energy got through. It wasn't a beam like mine but something disruptive, and when I checked systems I could tell it had done some damage. Shit. What was this guy doing with tech like that? And he knew how to use it, too, how to move and shoot at the same time. I'd bet he hadn't just been a body-slave; he must've been a bodyguard. 

I zapped him again, with the same ungratifying lack of result, and then I ran. Abuse rained down on me from the stands, and thanks to the aural I could hear every word. Mostly they were variations on "Stand and fight, you worthless scum!" Yeah, no thanks. I dodged another disruptive shimmer but the edge of his third caught me. It cut something out in my left leg, sending me sprawling to the sand. Before I could get to my feet, the guy pointed his new arm at me and something shot out of the nozzle. I was expecting a beam or another shimmer – some kind of ray, at least – but it was physical rather than tech, and it caught me by surprise. What came out of the nozzle was a net, and it covered me and pinned me where I lay.

Shit. This was it, then.

I mean, I could have pulled out my cutter and fought my way through it, or just tried to get the guy with my beam from the ground. But he had his disruptor arm pointed in my direction, and his shields were better than mine. I'd lost, and I knew it.

The guy held up his arms in victory, and the stands went wild. They were all screaming for blood and oil, begging the guy to flame me, to skewer me, to pull me apart one mod at a time. That was the way of Rome, letting the crowd decide, and it was clear they had already decided. There was nothing I could do, so I didn't bother. I just lay there and listened, and waited to go black.

Then I heard a voice. It was almost lost in the noise of the Arena, and I would have missed it without the aural. But to me it seemed to cut like a beam through the frenzied screams. It was quiet but strong, and it went straight to my skell: "Life. Life. Life."

For one moment I felt a surge of hope. I could sit up, struggle against the net. I could show those Romebots it would be worth it to let me live to fight again. Let the other guy take his percentage. I still had plenty of juice. 

_And what will that get you, Esca?_ The voice in my head overrode both the crowd's screams and the quiet chant. Nothing, that's what it would get me. Nothing at all. Just like all the work I'd done to get out of the mines had been made useless in the end. I wasn't getting out of the Arena anytime soon. Even if I did, I had nowhere to go. My clan had been parted out for the Romebots. I'd be back on the sand in another day, or another hour, maybe. And I'd be down one mod, so it would be harder to win the next time, and even harder the time after that. 

Either I got parted out now, or I'd be parted out bit by bit over the next few hours or days or weeks. It would be easier if I just went black here, on the sand. I stared up at the high domed roof, and waited for the beam.

It didn't come. Instead, little by little, the screaming all around me changed. As I listened, one voice after another picked up that soft, steady chant. "Life! Life! Life!"

The noise built, swelled, rolled over me like a groundstorm. I closed my eyes. I wasn't getting out of this the easy way. 

An announcement boomed from the amps, so loud it limited out in my aural. The emcee was reading out the list of my mods so the winner could pick what he wanted. In the middle of his recitation the Arena disruptor hit me, so I lay there like a sack of grain while two goons came and pulled the net off me. 

The winner came over and stood in front of me, studying my metal. "The beam on his right arm," he said after a moment. It was what I had figured he'd take. The crowd cheered again.

I thought they might cut it off there and then, but I guess they wanted to clear the sand for the next fight, because the goons slapped a lifter on me, hauled me out a side entrance into a small room, and dumped me onto an op table. Then they started disabling all my mods with a hand-switch so I'd be unarmed when the disrupt wore off.

From where I landed I could see tools lined up on a bench. One of the Arena workers went over and selected a couple, probably the pliers and the cutters. At least the beam was a clamp-on. I'd still have the arm, though it would be marked where the mod had been, the blue lines telling everybody that I had had something there once.

The Arena men were not gentle, and it hurt like a son of a bitch. Even a clamp-on gets to be part of you after you've had it long enough, and I'd had the beam ever since my spear-day, when I was considered a grown man in the clan. I mean, I had a couple aux circuits by then, because you can put them in early – you don't need to wait until your skell's mostly full-grown – but the beam was my first phys enhance, and when my arm got bigger as I got stronger, the prongs grew into my flesh.

It didn't take long. After they were done, they keyed the lifter again and one of the goons started maneuvering me out through another door and into the warren of corridors that filled the back part of the Arena building. It all looked the same to me, but I figured we were headed for the cell that had been my home since they'd brought me in.

"Wait," said the other. I could hear his voice but I couldn't see him, and I couldn't turn my head yet. "I'm getting new orders." After a moment, he laughed. "We're to take him to the pickup gate. Our boy here just got bought."

My heart began pounding. I could hear the blood in my head, as loud as if my aural had been amping it. If I could have screamed for joy I would have. Yeah, okay, I was still going to be a slave. But someone had bought me, and frankly, I didn't care if he wanted me to serve his dinner or suck his cock; I was getting out of the Arena. 

I wondered if it had been the one who had started the chant, who had turned the crowd in my favor. 

"Lucky bastard," said the one who was running the lifter. He made an abrupt turn and we headed down a different corridor than the one we'd been in. 

"Not really. It's Magistrate Aquila's nephew who bought him."

The lifter man let out an unpleasant laugh. "Should have guessed. From the wolfry's teeth into the serpent's gut, my friend," he said, and I suppose he was talking to me. "So that's why he called for life."

So the man who bought me was the man who had saved me. That was good, right? Except then why had the goon said I was going from bad to worse? What did he know?

* * *

I found out when the slave who had brought me back by lifter dropped me in the front room of the Aquila place. The disrupt had worn off but of course I couldn't do anything until the lifter was switched off. And when it was, I couldn't do much, with all my mods disabled. I picked myself up off the floor and stood warily in front of the men who had bought me.

One was an older Romebot, a big man with a shock of white hair, and he had the works; integrated optic and aurals, extra circuits across his chest that could have been anything from timers to lookups, and a full complement of military hardware on his arms and legs, stuff of the highest Q. He must have had some serious status and a whole lot of creds to have that much tech. The other held the hand-switch which had been keyed to my mods. He must have been the nephew. He was closer to my age and had the look of a soldier, too, with weapons and shields, but there was a lot more flesh to him than metal. 

"Thanks for saving me," I said. 

"Against your wish," said the younger one. He was looking at the place on my arm where the beam had been removed. 

I looked too, at the blue lines of dead flesh and the red of blood, and the empty plug that looked like a wound. It still hurt, but it wasn't as bad as it had been. Then I shrugged. "An Arena death is better than an Arena life. And it all comes to the same thing in the end."

The older one laughed. "Well said! But where do you suppose an Aquila life lands on that scale?"

I frowned at him. He had said it lightly, as though he really wanted to know. As though we were equals, and I could give him an answer.

Then the young one stepped toward me, and suddenly I got it. I knew why he'd bought me. My blood ran cold and my oil seized up, and I wanted to drop to the floor and cry. Because he walked with a limp. No, worse than that; he shuffled up with one leg dragging. His mod had gone blinky, or maybe it was still organic, severed and dead. I couldn't tell under the metal he wore. 

He wanted my legs.

In the mine and in the Arena, I had clung to the knowledge that it would take more than a goon with pliers and cutters to take my legs. True cybermods were a lot more delicate than clamp-ons. They'd have to be cut away carefully to ensure they had full function when removed; lots of little wires and stuff in the plugs, lots of metal struts that were currently fused to my flesh and would need to be individually disconnected. As a bonus – at least from my perspective – I probably wouldn't go black from loss of blood and oil, not with a real mech doing the work. And judging by the Aquila home and the Aquila enhances, he could afford a real mech.

He could probably even afford a set of basic low-Q legs from the yard for me, after. That kind of stuff was worse than organic, and I'd probably limp worse than he did now, but I'd have something. Of course, there was no reason he had to get me anything. He could just have my stumps plugged and stick me on a lifter. He could just let me go black, once he had my legs.

"You bought them," I said dully. "I guess you get them."

He reached out and grabbed my shoulders, which was probably a good thing because I wasn't sure how long I could keep standing on my own feet. His hands were big and strong, with the traceries of metal that spoke of good mods. "You keep them," he said. It was the voice that had cut through the shouting in the Arena: quiet, confident, firm. "I don't need you to crawl at my feet."

"Then why did you buy me?" 

There was no immediate answer from either Aquila. It gave me time to think, so I thought out loud. "You bought me from the Arena. That must have cost some creds. But if you had the creds, you could have got yourself a leg from the yards. Maybe even something high-Q from Rome, like he's got." I nodded in the direction of the uncle.

Who smiled widely, much to my surprise. "Marcus, I do believe you've made a fine choice," he said, and he left the room. Now it was just the two of us. The younger one – Marcus Aquila – looked intently at me. He only had a standard optic, like my old one that got taken, so I could see the rest of his face under it: thoughtful, calculating, more open than I'd ever expected a Romebot to be.

If it wasn't my legs, I guess he wanted my ass. Well, he bought it; he could have it. I almost wouldn't mind, because his metal was solid and his flesh was good-looking, and that expression on his face showed he had some brain circuits in his head. Too bad I hated him and everything he stood for.

"Okay," he finally said. He toggled the hand-switch and I felt everything coming online – aural, cutter, aux circuits, shield, legs. I even felt the beam that wasn't there, like it should be there. Like I could power it if I wanted. But the juice ended at the dead plug where my arm ached hard under a pattern of blue lines, and I knew it wouldn't do any good to power the empty space.

I stared at him. We were alone, and I could take him. I didn't have the beam, but I might be able to use the cutter on him. And I could run; with his limp, he wouldn't be able to stop me. I might even make it out without being taken again. Maybe.

"You could run," he said, like he was reading the thoughts right out of my brain circuits. "You might make it. But I've got a better offer for you."

"What do you want, if you don't want my legs?"

"Oh, I do want your legs. Only I want you to use them to help me."

"Help you do what?"

He smiled, a crafty smile. I heard the sub-sonic tap of him keying a command; the slave who'd brought me from the Arena appeared with a chair, and Aquila let himself fall into it. Then to my surprise the slave brought a second chair for me. Marcus indicated that I should sit. The slave brought a tray of food and set it between us; then he slipped out the door. I heard his footsteps tapping down the hall as he left.

"Have something to eat. Our cook's quite good."

I looked suspiciously at the tray. Aquila sighed and picked up a pastry, taking an ostentatious bite from it, so I took one, too. It was the first real food I'd eaten in years; on my own it was just forage and whatever meat I could bring down, and in the mine and the Arena it had been brick rations, nutritious and tasteless. 

"Help you do what," I repeated around a mouthful of pastry. It was hot and tart and thick and sweet, like meat and honey combined. I wondered if I dared take a second one. There were two glasses on the tray, and an opaque jug. I wondered what was in it.

"My father had an experimental mod. New tech."

I looked up sharply. New tech didn't exist; everything had been lost at the end of the Tech Age, and we were all left with whatever the mechs could keep running. 

He smiled wryly. "Yeah, I know. No such thing. But that's why it's so important." He took another bite, then picked up the jug and filled the two glasses. Water; clean, clear water. I could smell it. My hand was on the glass almost before he put the jug back down; then I whipped it away, suddenly unsure. I was his slave. I shouldn't be grabbing for the water.

"No, go ahead," he said, and I reached back and took the glass. I took a long drink, and I closed my eyes, it was that good. The best water I'd had since forever. Then another bite of the pastry. Oh, I could get used to this.

"So your father had new tech." I tasted the words in my mouth, like I'd tasted the pastry and the water. 

"He ran a military lab. They'd worked for years, and they finally had something. It wasn't as high-Q as the best of Old Rome, but it was something that had been made new, you know? He went out past the Wall to test it."

Past the Wall. The pastry went tasteless in my mouth. Nobody went past the Wall, not on purpose. The wolfry were thick there, and the serpents in the water, and the Sealies who, they said, modded their fingers into spikes and ripped people apart with them. They ate their flesh and melted their metal for more spikes. That was what they said.

Marcus Aquila was looking at me like he expected me to say something. I thought a moment. "He didn't come back." 

"No."

"Sounds like the mod failed the test, then. If he was taken."

His face went fierce under the optic. "It was an _experimental_ mod. The whole point is to show the world that Rome can make new tech. If we can make new tech, we can _do_ something." He slashed his hands through the air, sending pastry crumbs flying through the air. "So we come in here and take your mods – what's the point? They all go blinky sooner or later. If we can't make anything new, the whole of Rome is going to go blinky in the end. Everything goes blinky. Everyone goes black."

"You think he didn't go black? Your father?"

"I don't know. But if that experimental mod is still out there, we need to bring it back. For Rome."

For Rome, I thought. The last cause I ever wanted to support. But he had bought me, and it must have been expensive. And he wasn't going to take my legs.

"The mod, it had a code-name," he said. "It was called the Eagle."

"And you want me to help you bring it back. For Rome." I laughed harshly. "I hate Rome. I wouldn't piss on Rome if it were on fire."

"If you help me bring it back, I'll give you your freedom. No more mine-work, no more slave-work. No more fighting in the Arena. You would be a part of Rome." 

A part of Rome. That would be a hell of a lot better than being parted out for Rome. Not a bad percentage, assuming we survived.

He picked another pastry from the tray and brought it to his mouth. He took a bite, then another. "Then again, your systems are online. You could run," he said. "I can't stop you. My uncle probably couldn't stop you."

"You want me to help you bring back the Eagle."

"I do."

I studied him carefully, and he returned my gaze without blinking. I could run.

Instead I reached out and took another pastry. "Okay," I said. "When do we leave?"


	2. North to the Wall

Of course it wasn't as easy as that. There were clearances to arrange and adminwork to do – the Romebots loved their adminwork – and there were supplies to get, and even though the Aquilas had a fancy villa and real food and the best water on the rock, there were things creds couldn't buy.

And that was a real revelation for me, because since we Brigs mostly didn't have any creds at all, it always seemed like they were magic. Like, if you had the creds, you could do anything, and you wouldn't have to trade away your mods or your labor, you could just transmit the code and boom, you had a lifter or a beam or a permit to trade beyond the Wall, just like that. Of course, I was used to Brigs being the lowest of the low, of getting the least-favorable deal and the dirt at the bottom of the basket. I just figured the Romebots got everything, and they got it in a golden bowl. 

But all of the Romebots had creds. What mattered was status. And it turned out that even though the uncle had been, as I had figured, a military man, he was retired, and his service was on some other rock so his status didn't count for much here. And then Marcus Aquila's father had lost the Eagle, and that had cost the Aquilas a whole lot of status. Which I could see; I was still having trouble wrapping my brain around the idea of new tech, and that poor sucker lost it. If some mech north of the wall got his hands on it, that could mean a lot of problems for Rome.

I was the slave, so I got to go stand in a lot of lines. And when I got up to the desk, I'd give them the code and they'd run their checks and say, "Oh, sorry, I don't think we have any of this," or, "I'm afraid this code isn't valid," and I'd have to send back to the Aquilas while all the other slaves gave me rude looks and the citizens laughed behind their metal. It made the Aquilas look bad, which was the idea, I guess, and it made a whole lot of extra work for me. It took a while to get everything in order.

And then there was the matter of – well, the matter of Marcus Aquila. I was his brand-new body-slave, so you'd think I would get to take care of his body. Most of what he had me do for him was fetch and carry, so he wouldn't have to do more than walk across the room. Which made sense, since it took him longer to walk across the room than it did for me to walk across, get what he wanted, and come back and give it to him. 

But then there was the other stuff a body-slave was supposed to do. One of the other slaves told me what would be expected of me, so that first night I followed him to his cube. Or rather, I tried; he told me to wait outside until he called. I shrugged, did what I was told, but when I went in, he was already in his bed, wearing a nightshirt, the covers above his waist.

"You didn't want me to take your stuff off for you?"

"I'm a grown man, Esca. I can do it myself. Take the tunic to the laundry chute and then come back. You can sleep there," he said, indicating where a cot had been set out for me near the door. "If I need anything in the night, you get it."

"All right." I picked up the tunic from where it lay on the floor next to a small, neat pile of metal. "You want me to polish –"

"No. Don't touch that." His voice was so sharp I immediately straightened and backed away from the pile.

"Okay, whatever," I said, and I took the tunic to the laundry chute. When I went back into his cube I tried not to look at the metal. That evening when we'd been talking, I had wondered how much of his metal was integrated and how much was armor. You never could tell with Romebots; they wore their armor all the time except in the bed and in the baths, and the joke was that if they weren't worried about crushing their lovers or rusting in place, they wouldn't even take it off then. But Aquila wouldn't let me look at his body and he wouldn't let me look at his metal, so I was no wiser than I had been.

It wasn't until the third night that I clued in. I wasn't sleeping too well – I never did, not after I got taken to the mines. You got to watch your skell in a place like that, especially if you've got mods the guards or the top slaves might want, and that's something you can't do when you're asleep. So when I heard a noise, just a small one, my eyes flew open and my aural amped to high alert.

"I'm just getting up to leak," Aquila said softly. He had an optic enhance; he must have seen my open eyes, even though I couldn't see him in the dark. "I don't need help. Go back to sleep."

I closed my eyes, and I heard him go out the door. As soon as it closed behind him, I opened them again. 

You learn certain tricks when you don't have mods to fall back on. The first time the lights went out in the mine, I went for my hand-light – and it wasn't there, of course, since it had been disabled when I was taken. My optic had been taken by the slavers. I could have gone on my aural, listening hard for the way noises pinged hard off rock and metal, soft off flesh, but that was down, too. I could hear everybody moving toward the door, so I followed the noise, but I was stumbling on the uneven ground, bumping into the walls and into the other mine-slaves. Finally I grabbed one of them by the arm.

"What's happening?"

"Cave-in somewhere. Head for the door."

He tried to wrench free but I wouldn't let go. "I can't see! I can't hear!" The panic in my voice must have been obvious, because he suddenly stilled. 

"Let me guess. You used to have an optic?"

"Yeah." 

"Look at me." 

"I can't see –" I started, and then I shut up, because I could. I couldn't see a lot, just shape and shadow, but I could make out his form in front of me. "Oh."

"You kids," he said. I could hear the sneer of disgust. "So used to having lights and enhances you don't know how people used to get around in the dark back when we were a hundred percent flesh."

He couldn't have been that old. Civilized people hadn't been a hundred percent flesh since back before the Tech Age, back when they didn't have lifters or links or ships, and all of humanity was stuck on one rock. But he knew how to get around in the dark and I didn't, so I kept my mouth shut, and I listened to him explain that as long as there was a little light – and there _was_ a little light, from some kind of weird glowy scum that clung to the rock, that he said was a plant that absorbed the light and threw it back at us – your eyes would amp up after a little while, just like an optic. You just had to keep your eyes open, and not look right at the glowy stuff, or at anything bright.

So I opened my eyes as soon as Aquila was out of the room. There was some cityglow coming in through the window, and that was enough. Pretty soon I could make out the lines of his bed, and the heap of metal next to it. And I could hear his slow shuffle coming back down the hall, so I closed my eyes again until he'd come back in the room and limped past my cot.

I cracked my lids just enough to see. The cityglow reflected off the integrated metal in his arms, where they poked out from under the nightshirt, and off the edge of his optic. But his legs were flesh, every bit of them. Both the good one and the blinky one. The blinky leg wasn't shaped quite right, like there was a long, skinny piece missing out of it, and the flesh was darker there. A scar. He kept it covered with the metal so nobody could tell, but it was organic, a hundred percent.

I closed my eyes and turned my aural back down, but it took me a while to fall back asleep, because I was too busy thinking about Aquila. He wanted to keep his blinky organic leg, that was his business. He wanted to hide it behind metal so nobody could see it was organic, that was his business, too. But he wanted me to go on a dangerous journey with him. That made it my business.

Finally I asked him straight out.

"We're going past the Wall."

"That's right."

"You and me."

He trained his optic on me like he was looking right into me, into my heart and my guts and all my aux circuits. "Esca, is there a problem?"

I shrugged. "You're the boss. Except I was wondering how you are planning to come along when you have so much trouble walking."

He looked away, and I saw his hands curl into fists. For a moment I got nervous I might have said too much. This was a sweet deal I'd lucked into when he'd bought me – if I ignored the looming journey that was probably going to end up with us both going black and parted out for the Sealies – and if I got him upset enough, maybe he _would_ take my legs, after all. Or send me back into the Arena, which would be worse.

"I've got a vipsy."

"A what?"

"A vipsy. A transport for vips, you know. The elite of Roman society." I didn't say anything, but he must have seen my thought cross my face, because his face creased into a crooked smile. "We Aquilas used to be vips once."

Before his father lost Rome's hope for new tech and the Aquilas lost all their status, I guessed he meant. "So how does this transport work?"

"Come on, I'll show you." He led me out to the back garden and opened a shed. "I use it when I have to get around town. It's got a solar charger and a carry-rack, so we can use it to carry me and anything we need to bring."

The vipsy turned out to be something like a skinny chair on a lifter. Aquila straddled the chair part to show me how it worked; he locked onto a private frequency to give it commands, and it backed, turned, and moved forward for him like it was part of his own body. It could keep up with me at an easy lope, no problem.

"Pretty sharp," I admitted. "Never seen anything like this out in the country."

"There aren't many of them. My father only made four."

My head snapped up. "Your father _made_ this?"

"Don't get excited. It's not really new tech; it's just old parts repurposed, snapped together, altered a little. He was practicing with what he had, he and his mech team. They had to understand the tech completely, know how to take it apart and put it back together, before they could even start trying to make something new." 

I reached out to touch the vipsy, and it vibrated against my fingertips. It almost seemed alive, like a creature rather than a piece of tech. "This'll get you to the Wall, for sure," I said. "But what are you going to do on the other side?"

He frowned. "What do you mean?"

"I mean that you're not taking it past the Wall. Not unless you want to get ambushed and parted out." I looked at him pointedly. "The Picts and the Sealies are going to be on you like a pack of wolfry. Vips don't go past the Wall."

"My father did."

"Yeah, and look what it got him," I said, and that was a pretty nasty thing to say, but I had to say it. "Look, you got me to come along with you because you wanted a native guide, right? I've traded with the tribes on the other side. I know what I'm saying, and I'm saying if you take that across, they're going to take it – along with every bit of metal you've got in you. You want to keep your circuits, you go quiet and you don't draw attention to yourself."

"I thought you hadn't been past the Wall," he said quietly.

"Of course I haven't been _past_ it! But I've been at it, okay? I've been there, and I've seen what the people who live on the other side are like. If you can call them that." I shuddered. "Those stories they tell, they're not just stories." 

"They don't get a lot of tech out there."

"And you think that makes them less dangerous?"

"Disruptors work on the organic circuits in your head as well as they work on tech."

"Disruptors don't do jack against a rock thrown at you from outside your range. And they've got a lot of rocks out there."

"Then we'll have to outrun them. This can do it," he said, gently slapping the back of the vipsy, "and I imagine you can, too."

I was getting frustrated. I banged my hand hard against the shed the vipsy had been in; it made a satisfying noise. "At some point you're going to have to stop running, and then they're going to take it from you, and you're not going to be able to do anything about it."

He shrugged. "So they take it. If we get the Eagle, I'm not going to need the vipsy."

It was on the tip of my tongue to ask him what would happen if we didn't get it. But I didn't need to ask. Either we got the Eagle, or we got parted out. He was a Romebot, and it was glory or death for him. Which meant I got the same.

The Arena goon had been smack-on; I had indeed gone from the wolfry's teeth to the serpent's gut.

* * *

Maybe I was heading for the serpent's gut, but it still felt good to get out of C-town. The gate guards looked me up and down like they were wondering what they could take for a percentage, but Aquila transmitted our clearance and they opened up and let us out. It was like the air was clearer out there, and I sucked in a good breath and let it out.

It felt even better when Aquila put his vipsy into gear and I could stretch out my legs and let them do what they were designed to do. They'd been disabled when I was taken by the slavers, and in the Arena there wasn't enough room to get up to speed. It had been two years since I'd been able to let fly, to really cover ground the way I could with the cybermod legs, and it was amazing. Like when you get a new mod and you switch it on for the first time, and suddenly you can see in the dark, or hear the subsonics, or know exactly what time it is to the millisec. I'd forgotten what it was to really move, and I went shooting past Aquila, whooping with delight.

I _could_ run, I thought. Forget Aquila and his Eagle and his crazy mission. Of course, he could chase me down; the vipsy could probably move as fast as I could, if not faster, and he had a beam and a disruptor and all sorts of other high-Q stuff on him. I'd be crashed on my back in an instant if he wanted to zap me. Or he could just tap codes to Central and the roving skybots would find me, disrupt me, scoop me up and bring me back.

But I didn't think he would. He was the first Romebot I'd ever met who wasn't a guard or a slaver or a soldier – well, he had been a soldier, but he wasn't any more. That first week I was at the Aquila place I asked the other slaves about him, and they said he'd been dumped from the military because he wouldn't get a new leg. Which made it even stranger that he just limped around with his blinky one. But when I tried to get more answers, they clamped their mouths so tight it was like they were welded shut. They might have been slaves, but they liked him. 

And I could see why. All the other Romebots I'd had the lack of joy to encounter looked at me like they wanted to part me out right there. But with Aquila, it was like he looked at me and saw my flesh, not just my mods. 

And that was why I _didn't_ run. 

I looped back and circled Aquila a few times, then fell in beside him. "Okay, you can part me out now. That was worth it."

He laughed. "Now you're tempting me. How long would it take before I could run like that?"

"They click in pretty quick," I said. "Assuming you've got a good mech to do the install." Then I got quiet, because I was remembering our clan mech. He had been real good, all right. I wondered if he'd been parted out after the fight with the Romebots, or if they'd taken him to work on their own tech. There hadn't been anyone left to tell me, when I'd come back from my trading trip. The blood and oil on the ground told the story. That, and the flesh that had been left to rot. I had heaved up everything in my stomach when I got near enough to smell it, although maybe that was a good thing, because there wasn't anything left to heave when I came across what was left of Cunoval.

I must have been scowling pretty fierce, because when I finally thought to glance over to Aquila, he was looking at me with this odd expression on his face. Like he knew what I was thinking, and he didn't like it any more than I did. He didn't say anything, just nodded and faced front again, and we kept loping north, toward the Wall.

We had to stop each night, of course. Just because I had leg mods didn't mean I was a machine. After that first crazy burst of speed, we kept a pretty sedate pace, maybe twice what someone with flesh legs could do, but I still got tired toward the end of the day, and everybody's got to sleep, even if they're ninety-nine percent metal. The vipsy couldn't run more than a couple of hours at night, since it was solar, but anyway, nobody who didn't want to go black went out at night by choice.

It was bad enough during the day, especially as we got close to the Wall and there were fewer skybots arcing over our heads keeping watch over the roads. Most people traveled in packs like wolfry, figuring there was safety in numbers. Nobody wanted to get zapped by slavers or body-dealers. Close to the cities, the soldiers ran patrols, but they mostly looked out for the interests of the other Romans. If you were a Brig or a Cenie, the soldiers would just as soon part you out themselves, or so it always seemed to me.

Which is why we got a lot of weird looks. A Roman and a Brig traveling together, that was probably something they didn't see too often. But it kept the soldiers away from me, and it kept the tribal gangs away from him, so I guess it was a good thing. 

And I found myself enjoying the journey, as long as I didn't think too hard about what was likely to happen when we got to where we were going. We didn't talk much while we were on the road, which was fine by me. When we stopped for the night – usually at an inn, sometimes just under a tree by the side of the road – we'd have our meal together, almost like we were friends, instead of master and slave; and Aquila told me stories about his father.

"I don't really remember a lot," he admitted one evening, as we sat at a tavern's long table. We were about halfway to the Wall by then, and I'd become comfortable enough in his presence to relax by his side. "It was eight years ago he vanished. I was sixteen, the last time I saw him."

I did the math in my head. That made him two years older than me. 

"Eight years, and Rome hasn't kept up the work he did on this experimental Eagle thing?"

"They can't. They don't have the prototype – they don't have _any_ prototype. This was their ninth attempt, but all the early versions that didn't work, they broke down to rework to make into the newest one. And they were working on it for years."

"Didn't he record what he'd done?"

"There are records. But Rome Central says there's nobody left who's good enough to do anything with them. He took his best mechs with him on the test mission." He looked down at his food. He hadn't really been eating, just pushing it around on the plate, and he pushed it around a little more. "None of them came back."

Great, I thought. The percentage was looking worse all the time. "So what good will it do if you find it? If there's nobody who could do anything with it."

His lips tightened. I must have struck a nerve. "Central says that. I don't know that I believe them. I think it's just that nobody wants to touch a project which flamed out so hard. But see, if I can bring it back with me – it'll change everything. They'll _have_ to start up the Eagle Lab again, start working on creating new tech again. Otherwise…" He stabbed a piece of meat and stuck it in his mouth, then made a face.

"Yeah, not as tasty as what your cook makes," I said. "But we both need the juice, so eat up."

The corners of his mouth tilted up a fraction, and he nodded. It was clear to me he'd only put the food in his mouth so he wouldn't have to finish the sentence, because I knew how it ended. 

Otherwise, it didn't matter that the Eagle was new tech, if they just made that one thing and nothing else. The whole point of new tech was that they'd created something from the beginning – that they'd figured out how to move on, make new stuff, not just keep using the old stuff until it went blinky and black.

That would make the Eagle old tech, even if it was just eight years old. Eventually it would go blinky just like everything else. And so would Rome.

* * *

I hadn't lied to Aquila. I'd been to the Wall– twice. The first time was with Beric, who usually did most of our trading. I had been on trading journeys to other places with him before – he liked me, because I knew when to back up whatever claims he was making, and when to keep my mouth shut. Mostly it was the latter.

The second time I was by myself, and I came back to find my clan gone.

But Aquila hadn't been to the Wall before, ever. Not that anyone could tell, the way he sauntered up to the guards at the southern gate on his vipsy and transmitted our clearance. 

"Yes, sir! Legion approval noted and filed. You are cleared through this checkpoint, and to exit into the North. But –" and here the guard's voice dropped – "I wouldn't trust _that Brig_ if I were you. Sir."

_That Brig_ , as it happened, had his aural amped high and could hear every word. Including Aquila's response, which had enough ice in it that if that guard's ear had been organic, it would have frozen up and fallen off. Anyway, we were in.

The Wall isn't just a wall, of course. It's a whole line of fortresses, and around them are the villages that naturally spring up around fortresses to service the soldiers who run them. And by that I mean villages that are mostly made up of markets, mech shops, taverns, gaming dens, and whorehouses. Which is not a bad kind of village; there's something for everyone. The first gate is a kind of control valve, I guess, for the Romans – so they can control who gets into the no-man's land of the Wall from this side, just like the gate on the wild side is to make sure the Picts and Sealies only come through in few enough numbers not to be threatening. They don't want to keep them out altogether, because Rome gets their percentage from every trade across the Wall – but they don't want to risk an invasion.

We headed into the market square, and it was a good thing I was there to guide Aquila's vipsy, because his head was swiveling around so fast looking at everything, it was like he had a ball-joint neck mod. His optic zoomed in and out as he focused on one sight after another: on the stall with huge fish hanging from the cross-beams, with silver scales like metal and teeth like a serpent's; on the stacks of old, dead cybermods, useless to anyone except for parts; on the family of Picts with their circuits tattooed on the surface of their skin, a dark line for every wire in their body; on the dark-skinned whore from some far-away rock whose four breasts were even with my forehead. There were people who were all flesh, and people who were ninety-nine percent metal, and people who had mods stuck in the wrong places, metal arms grafted onto their hips and optics on their elbows. It was a three-sixty freakshow, and I didn't blame Aquila for being unable to look away.

We got our own share of the looks, too. Or at least the vipsy did; I moved closer to Aquila, when I saw how many eyes and optics – and other, more threatening bits of metal – were pointed in our direction. "Now do you get me?" I murmured quietly, knowing he'd pick up in his aural. "Don't worry. The soldiers will flash a beam at anyone who tries to take you. But out there, we'll be on our own."

"I get you," he said, just as quietly. "So what do we do?"

I thought a moment. I remembered that on my last trading trip, my solo trip, I'd done some business with a mech who seemed like an honest guy. He was an older man with lots of solid metal who lived somewhere up in the north but spent about half of each year in the Wall town, making creds and trades. If he was here now, he might take the vipsy on a deadman's deal: if we came back, he'd get paid, and if we didn't, he'd own it. Better yet, he might have info on a party of Romebots that would have come past the Wall eight years ago, and never returned.

I told Aquila about my plan, and he nodded. I asked at one of the booths, and the woman there pointed me across the square, over to the big stone bays set in the far side of the village wall. The big central ones were used full-time by the locals, and then there were the smaller ones off to the sides that were rented by the traveling mechs to use as temporary workshops.

There was just as much to gawk at as there had been in the square. The sharp scent of blood and oil filled the air. Most of the mechs were doing maintenance, either on installed mods or on detached units. One of the mechs was installing a cybermod right there in the open, clicking it in, wiring it up. There was a big crowd in front of one of the bays, and we slipped in among them to see what was going on. It was a removal, a tough one, and the body on the table was moaning with pain. The mech was doing a hack job, I thought; I could see the ragged edges of the wires, and the broken bits of metal that shouldn't have been left in the flesh. I winced, thinking of my own probable fate once we crossed through the north gate.

I found him in a small bay toward the end. He was back inside the alcove, oiling something and polishing it with a soft cloth.

"Hello?" I called. "It's Esca the Brig, son of Cunoval." Saying that last almost hurt. But that was how people knew me, before I became Esca the mine-slave. He put down what he was working on and slowly walked out toward us, out into the open.

"Esca the Brig, yes, I remember you," he said, although I doubted he really did; after all, it had been two years. He was a big man with shaggy dark hair, and his mods were solid and high-Q, like he'd been somebody important, once. They were old mods; not like our clan mods were old, carefully handed down and maintained through the generations, but the kind that the older military Romebots had. Like Aquila's uncle, I suddenly realized. Then he caught sight of Aquila on his vipsy, and his whole manner changed. He looked wary, like a stag or a cornered wolfry, and one of his arms twitched like he wanted to shoot a beam at us. Then he amped down almost visibly, like he was forcing himself to drop power.

He reached out with a hand that was mostly metal and touched the vipsy just below the forward extension. "Well, well," he said. "I haven't seen one of these in years."

"No," said Aquila, and his voice sounded like it was being pushed through a screen, all rough and ragged, and I turned to look at him. I'd been focusing on the mech and hadn't even thought about Aquila. He was looking the mech up and down like he was trying to find a secret message in the patterns of his wires. "There were only four of them made. But you knew that, didn't you."

"You think I would know that?" He didn't sound surprised, though. His gaze moved from the vipsy to Aquila, and I could see his optic sharpen.

"Your mods," said Aquila. "They're military mods, from the tech auxiliary force. I recognize your shoulder-shield, and your wrist tools. I – I knew someone once who had the same."

The mech nodded. "You'd better come in, then, young Aquila. Oh, yes, I know who you are. You have much of your father in you."

"You were one of his mechs."

"I was. My name is Guern, and I was your father's best mech," he said, with no little pride. "And you're looking for the Eagle, aren't you."

"I am," said Aquila.


	3. From the Wolfry's Teeth to the Serpent's Gut

"So what I don't get," I said, popping a piece of something that looked like meat but tasted like a turnip into my mouth, "is why you took the Eagle past the Wall in the first place."

Guern the mech nodded. "Ah, yes. To test it. And you will then ask why we could not test it in Roman territory."

That was exactly what I would have asked, so I just chewed on the turnip thing and waited. Guern had invited us to stay and share a meal with him, since it was just past midday. He had sent out a boy for food from one of the market booths: a big covered urn of stew and three bowls, and a carafe of some kind of pale juice. Then Guern drew the curtain across the front of the bay, cleared the wires and metal struts from one of his worktables, and pulled up some crates for us to sit on. 

Now he pointed at the curtain. "For the same reason that I have closed off my workshop: to give us a bit of privacy. Skybots do not go north of the Wall."

I shrugged. "But you're Rome. Skybots are Rome."

"Not all of Rome agreed with what we were doing."

"My father said that some called it a foolish waste of resources," said Aquila. "They said the lab should be torn down and the machines used for other things."

"Some did," agreed Guern. 

"Most did. Because that's what happened when you didn't come back." 

I had been with Aquila now for enough days that I could read his voice even without tuning my aural. The fine tremor that meant he was a little nervous; the quickness of speech that meant curiosity; the rough growl of anger underneath it all. The slight emphasis on _you_ , as though it had entirely been Guern's fault. None of it surprised me. I was only surprised he hadn't grabbed Guern by the throat and demanded to know what had happened to his father and the Eagle. 

But I guess Guern read it all, too, in his voice or in his eyes, because he nodded. "I suppose they were right to do so. The test did not go as planned." He hesitated a moment. "You know that he went black."

"I know," said Aquila. He swallowed thickly. "But I want to know how it happened. And why you – why you are here. What became of my father's men? Where is the Eagle now?"

"A lot of questions. I have some answers. Maybe not all of them."

He took a long drink from the carafe of juice, then passed it to me. It was thin, sour enough to make my lips pucker, and I only drank enough to wet my mouth before setting it in front of Aquila, who ignored it.

"Any answers are more than what I have now."

Guern leaned forward onto the work table. "You have to understand that there was a lot of opposition to the Eagle project from the beginning. We were buying up mods and taking them apart, trying to understand how they worked. Some factions didn't like that, called it a waste. Then there was the new metal we used, which some wanted for armor and repairs, not for experiments. The skybots and ship frames need a lot of metal, and we had a hard time requisitioning enough for our lab. We were told the lazy mine-slaves didn't produce enough to waste on unproven work."

My mouthful of stew caught in my throat when he said that. I coughed and spat, choking on it, and it was like a pressure on my gut, on my skell, pushing me back down into the mines. Aquila slid the carafe into my hand, his fingers lingering against mine for just longer than an instant. I gulped down some juice. It didn't fix the jeebies in my gut but it cleared my throat, and after I coughed a few more times I was breathing again. "It's all right," he murmured to me, and then to Guern: "Go on."

"Some of the old families supported us. Thought it was a fine Roman ambition, to push forward, to reclaim the invention of new tech and usher in a new Tech Age. Others feared what we were doing, felt we were threatening their power base. After all, if we could make new mods, what was the value of their old ones?"

Aquila nodded. "So you went past the Wall to get away from your enemies."

"We tried. But it didn't work. We had hoped we'd be able to do our field testing with a small group of trusted men. Slip in, do our work, slip out. But we had to go through Central, and they insisted we bring along soldiers, to protect us from the wild creatures north of the Wall."

"And they betrayed you," I guessed.

"In a way. The factions against us had been spreading rumors. We'd had a lot of failures before we had something we thought would work. They put a downspin on it, told the men that we were cursed. They warned the men that there would always be something going wrong. They said that those who worked with us found their mods going blinky at the worst possible time, or that if anything happened to them in battle they'd be parted out instead of repaired.

"So nobody wanted to go on this mission. We ended up with the dregs of the Empire, and there was a lot of infighting among the men. Many of them deserted. By the time we got to the place we'd chosen for the test, we had too few men to be an effective force, and too many to be stealthy."

"Many of them deserted," repeated Aquila, his eyes fixed on Guern. "You seem to have made a place for yourself here."

What I could see of Guern's face around the integrated optic flushed red, and his lips tightened. "I wasn't one of them."

Aquila shrugged, but I could see his shoulders were tense. "You're not Rome-born. I wouldn't blame you."

"I was the best mech on the team," Guern said evenly. "It was my project as much as it was Flavius Aquila's. It was his vision that created the Eagle, but it was my tools and my work." He looked down at his bowl of stew. His next words were almost too quiet to hear. "And it was my failure."

I could see Aquila's hands curling into fists. I wanted to put my hand on his, tell him it was all right, like he'd done for me when Guern had mentioned mine-slaves and my throat had seized up. But he was here after his father's story. He wanted to hear it, even if he knew he wasn't going to like it. And anyway, I was just a slave, brought along to help him get around and smooth his way among the tribes. I kept my voicebox shut, and let him speak. 

Finally he did: "Tell me."

"I did the install – he wanted me to do it because I was the best on the team," Guern said, and it came out in a soft rush of words, like it was something he'd wanted to say for a long time but never had. "We had templated it on existing mods, but the wiring was new, more complex. It wasn't a simple click job. And because of the way it fit around his shoulders, the tabs went directly into the skell near the aux circuits – of course we'd used shielding and filters, but we hadn't anticipated the interference."

He might have been speaking another language as far as I was concerned – I was a hunter and a trader-apprentice, not a mech – but Aquila seemed to get it. I'd already figured that he had been studying his father's work, that maybe what he really wanted was not just for Central to start up the Eagle lab again, but to put him in charge of it. But what caught in my aural was what Guern had said about fitting it. "What do you mean, around his shoulders?" I asked, at the same time Aquila asked, "What kind of interference?"

But it was my question Guern answered. He looked at me, frowning, then at Aquila. "He doesn't know?"

"I don't know what?" 

"It never came up," said Aquila, sounding bemused. "Esca, the mod's code-named Eagle. What do you imagine it did?"

I thought a moment. Shoulders. The Eagle. And then it hit me. "Eagles fly," I said. Aquila smiled, and I shook my head. "You're joking."

"Not at all." 

I whistled softly between my teeth. No wonder Aquila wanted to retrieve their experiment. It was a dream of every kid, to have a mod that would let you fly. But there weren't any. The skybots flew, but they were tiny drones. Sometimes people would find one that had fallen out of the sky and try to repower it and splice it into a mod, but it never worked. Whatever it was that made them fly only had enough juice to lift the optic and transmitter. Probably a good thing nobody ever managed to splice them in, since after a day or so the Romebots would come by to retrieve their fallen tech, and I doubt they'd have a problem with taking someone's arm along with it.

Rome did have its big ships. After all, that's how they got to this rock in the first place, coming down out of the blue to stake their claim – on the rock, and on its inhabitants. But the rumor was that there were only six ships left from the original fifteen of the Invasion; nobody knew for sure, of course, because Central kept a sharp guard and changed the paint on them every so often so you couldn't tell if it was the same one or not, but nobody had seen more than six at a time in years. The others had gone blinky, rumor was, and the tech had been lost.

I looked over at Aquila's vipsy, which sat by the side of the shop. "So the vipsy was practice."

"That's right," said Guern. "We based our tech on the lifter, but it took a long time and a lot of work to come up with a design that did more than hover an armspan off the ground. But we did it."

"It worked. Didn't it? Did he fly?" I could hear the yearning in Aquila's voice. It had been his father's great dream, and maybe his, too.

"It worked," said Guern. "He flew. For a while." He sighed, poked at the stew in his bowl. "For the test flight, we'd chosen a bare hillside well inland, far from any villages. We didn't want to be seen by the tribesmen any more than we wanted to be seen by Rome Central. What we didn't know was that a Sealie hunting party was in the woods nearby."

"You didn't check?"

"We sent men to clear the area. But as I said, they weren't the most reliable of soldiers. And they didn't bother to hide their presence; the Sealies might have seen them and hidden until they'd passed. So we didn't know they were there. Until they struck."

"Tell me," said Aquila again.

"He flew. And the Sealies shot him down."

"His shields –" began Aquila, but Guern shook his head.

"His shield circuits failed. Listen to me, young Marcus Aquila. Your father was a hero. All the time he was falling, he worked to analyze what was happening. When he hit the ground we tried to reach him, but the Sealies fought us off, and some of the men – well, as I said, there were a lot of deserters."

"So he crashed and burned." 

"He hadn't yet gone black when he hit the ground. He transmitted to us, told us his shields had gone blinky, guessed it was interference from the Eagle's wiring." He took a deep breath, swallowed hard. Looked away from us both. "And then the Sealies got him."

"And you ran." Aquila's voice had no emotion in it, but I could feel the anger and sorrow coming off him in waves. It must have taken all his control to sit there calmly, listening. 

"And I ran. I'm no hero. I was no soldier – I was only a mech. I saw the Sealies tear apart the soldiers they had taken down, and I ran. I'd been hit by one of their arrows, and I was wounded. I was sick. I thought I could hear them behind me, hunting me.

"I left behind all the gear that would mark me as a Roman, everything that wasn't hardwired in. You're right, I'm not Rome-born; I'm from New Gaul, and I can pass as a Pict in the right light. I stumbled into a village and threw myself on the mercy of the tribesmen. I was lucky. They needed a mech, and – and there was a woman, who needed a man, and decided I would do for her. She spoke for me against those who would have left me to the hunt." He looked up at Aquila. "And so I suppose I _was_ a deserter, in the end."

Next to me, Aquila still felt like a juiced wire, ready to arc at a touch. I tensed myself to intervene if he powered his weapons; I might have been bound to him as his slave, but Guern was a good man, I thought, and a good mech, and anyway, even with Aquila being a Roman and Guern just a villager from beyond the Wall, there would be questions neither of us would want to answer, if Aquila cut him down. It would be doing him a service to keep him from zapping the mech. Keeping him out of trouble.

But all Aquila did was ask: "Where is the Eagle now?"

Guern reached across the table and tapped Aquila's arm, right on the aperture of one of his weapons – I guessed it was a beam, higher Q than the one I'd lost in the Arena. "You want to go black, key your overload. Save yourself the journey north. Just get out of my shop first so you don't take me and my things with you."

"Where is the Eagle now?" Aquila repeated his question, as though Guern hadn't spoken. I didn't move. Both of them had that tension in them, like their mods were overpowered and spitting sparks, and I did not want to give either of them the excuse to fire anything in my direction.

And then all the energy seemed to evaporate from Guern. His whole body sagged as if he had been hit with a disrupt. He shook his head slowly. "I don't know. Two days north and west of here, maybe three. There aren't that many Sealie villages. I'll give you the coordinates of our test site for a starting place." He looked at the vipsy. "If you can wait to set out until tomorrow morning, I can rig up a cart for you. It'll be less conspicuous. There's a decent lodge two buildings over where they won't knock you on the head and part you out." He jerked a thumb to the west.

"We can wait," I said quickly. "Good idea, thank you. It's bad enough with the looks we get in the square."

"Yes, thank you," said Aquila. He stood abruptly, like all those sparks in him needed somewhere to go. He moved toward the vipsy, then stopped. "We can leave this here."

"That would be wise," said Guern. "If you can walk?"

"I can walk." 

"If it's a problem with a mod I can –"

"I can walk," said Aquila sharply. He turned toward me. "Esca, are you coming?"

I wondered if he meant now, or tomorrow morning. If he meant to give me a choice, even though I was his slave. It didn't matter; I'd thrown my lot in with him. "I go where you go," I said, and I hoisted our things out of the vipsy's carry-case, and followed him out of the workshop.

* * *

We went to the inn Guern had suggested. It was a small, neat place, both nicer and cheaper than the one where I'd stayed on my previous visits. A few people had already started drinking in the tavern on the ground floor, even though there were still a few hours left in the market day. The innkeeper rented us a room on the next floor – Aquila could handle a single set of stairs all right – and didn't seem fazed by us being who we were, a Roman and a Brig. From the looks of the tavern, the place was frequented by traders from both sides of the Wall; mostly tribesmen, basic mods and not too many, though one old man had the look of a Roman to him, and his metal gleamed in the low light. 

"Go back to the market and get us supplies for the journey," Aquila said. "I'll wait here and have a drink."

It was probably safe for him in the tavern, and anyway, he'd just slow me down if he came along. It made sense to stock up, too. I didn't know what the hunting might be like, north of the Wall. And it would be smart to stay away from the villages. He transferred me some creds, and I headed out to the market.

By the time I got back with my purchases, it was getting on towards dusk. This far north it was a slow dusk, the sun rolling sideways along the hills for hours. The air had that softer look to it, not the crisp hardness of midday light but something pinker and fuller. I'd enjoyed the afternoon out. After those weeks back in C-town dealing with Romebots and their regulations, it had been a pleasure to lose myself among the raucous stalls of an open-air market, the sharp scents of smoked meats and tangy cheeses. Instead of standing in lines and paying the marked prices, I was bargaining and making deals, like I'd done back when I was representing our clan. I felt free and loose for the first time in years. 

The tavern had begun to fill, clusters of men and women at the tables in twos and threes, talking and laughing. Aquila was still at the table where I'd left him, a mug half-full of heather beer on the table in front of him. "Esca," he said. "Let us eat, and then we should go up and sleep, for we leave early in the morning."

"You're not drinking wine?"

"Their wine is swill. The beer is better."

I signaled for another mug of beer, and when it came I told the barmaid to bring us what they had for a meal. I took a long swig of my beer. "So what were you doing while I was spending your creds?" I asked Aquila.

"Listening. Talking. Drinking."

"Talking?" 

He tilted his head toward the old man I'd thought looked Roman. "Cornelius Barbatus over there wanted to know what business a young man such as myself might have at the Wall."

"So you told him…" I lifted an eyebrow.

"Why, the truth, of course – that I'm a traveling mech, specializing in optics. I offered to adjust his if he bought me a drink."

"And did he?" 

"Alas, no. I suppose he wasn't too juiced by the idea of a beer-drinking mech spinning tools on his mods. So I had to buy my own." Aquila sighed and drained his mug. "You'll buy the next round?"

I shrugged. "They're your creds anyway." But I wondered exactly how much he had had to drink. He seemed a lot more relaxed than he'd been when we'd left Guern's workshop, which was probably a good thing, considering how much he'd been buzzing. "Did your listening get you anything useful?"

"Here comes our food," he said, which I took to mean that he'd tell me later, in private. 

After we ate and finished our beers, we went up to our room. I stashed the food I'd bought with the rest of our gear while he got rid of his excess beer; then I went in to take a leak when he was done. When I came out of the toilet, he was lying on one of the beds, leaning up against the headboard with his hands laced behind his head, and he was smiling.

I started towards the other bed, but he motioned for me to sit beside him. "No, come here, listen. Cornelius Barbatus told me where the Sealie villages are. I've got the coordinates. There are only four, and the Eagle's got to be in one of them."

I was wrong about him being more relaxed. The beer had just put a thin layer over him, like metal armor over organic flesh; underneath he was still juiced, still ready to spark. If we didn't have to wait for Guern to put together the cart he'd promised us, he'd be out on the road right now, I could tell. I shook my head. "You think we can just float right in to the Sealie villages? 'Oh, excuse me, you've got my father's mod, could you give it to me? Why, thank you!'"

"I'm going to tell them I'm a mech," he said. He uncoiled from the headboard and leaned forward to put one hand on my arm. "You're a Brig – they'll listen to you if you say I'm a mech."

"The Sealies don't need mechs," I said grimly. "And if you think I'm going to risk my mods just to get you in, your brain's gone blinky. They'll part us out, both of us."

"You don't have to come with me. Stay here, if you'd rather."

I looked into his face. Behind the optic, his eyes were bright but they were calm. He was smiling. He was looking forward to this journey, the son of a bitch, and—I looked away. "I told you," I finally muttered. "I go where you go."

"Good," he said. He squeezed my arm. Then he pulled me forward, and he kissed me.

Yeah, he was amped all right, buzzing like a hot wire. He was juiced for the journey, because he had a line on the Eagle, and he was juiced on however many mugs of beer he'd had while I was in the market. Me, I didn't have any excuse. But I kissed him back anyway. He tasted like heather beer, sweet and bitter at the same time.

He pulled me to him and rolled over, so he was straddling me, looking down at me. "Esca, we are going to do this thing. We are going to bring back the Eagle and Rome is going to _tremble_."

He looked fierce. He looked beautiful. Forget about Rome, I thought; I was the one trembling here, under the weight of his body and the weight of his gaze. It had been a long time since anyone had looked at me like that. And it wasn't just anyone; it was Aquila, who had been kinder to me than I'd expected, who had surprised me by treating me like an equal, not as a slave. He had saved me from the Arena, and he hadn't taken my legs, and he could have had me any time he wanted but he had waited until now, and that was long enough to wait, I decided, and so I reached my arms around him and pulled him down against me.

The metal on his chest clattered against the metal on mine, but where our hips met it was flesh to flesh, separated only by our clothing. He was as hard and as ready as I was. He licked down my neck to where flesh met metal, tongued against the lip of my aux panel. I slid my hand under his tunic and let my fingers play across his fine ass, dipping down toward the back of his thigh.

Abruptly he pulled away from me and sat up, facing away from me. "No," he said, but his breathing was ragged, and his heartbeat was so loud I didn't even need my aural to hear it.

"You don't mean that."

He didn't look at me. "I've promised you your freedom."

It took me a moment to catch up with his thoughts. "I'm not doing this because I'm your slave. I'm doing this because I like you, and – because I want you," I added deliberately, carefully, because that was not something that Romans cared about when it came to slaves; but he'd just said it again, that he would give me my freedom, and so I figured he wouldn't be offended. "And the last time I had someone else's hand on my cock it was two years ago, so I think I'm about due." I laughed; he didn't.

I slid up close behind him. "That was also the last time I had my hand on someone else's cock," I murmured, reaching for him again. I let one hand rest on his shoulder, and curved my other arm around the metal at his waist, plucked at the fastenings with my fingers. "Let me take this off."

His head tilted backward, and I caressed the side of his neck, bent my lips to it. "Aquila," I whispered against his neck. " _Marcus_. I want this. Do you?" I did not say that this might be the last time for us both, but I'm sure it was in his mind just as it was in mine. 

He shivered against me. I dropped my hand lower, cupped it around his hard flesh. A sound escaped him, and he pressed back against my body. Then my fingers slid against the metal on his thigh, the metal I knew was only armor; he tensed in my arms, and I knew what was wrong.

I released him and leaned back, and began to pull off my clothes. "I know about your leg, that it's organic," I said quietly. "It's okay with me. There's no reason to keep trying to hide it."

"It's not that I'm hiding it," he said. He turned toward me and gave me a half smile. "It's just that I'm tired of the questions."

He began to strip, and I watched him. He hadn't really told the truth; we'd bedded down in the same room or under the same tree for the past month, and he'd been trying to hide his leg, all right. He'd been dressing and undressing in the dark, under the blankets, turned away from me. The light was dim now, but there was enough to see him: his solid body, his broad shoulders, his legs that even now were curved away from me, as though he were still trying to keep me from seeing them.

"I won't ask you questions, then," I said. There were other things I wanted to do with my mouth, anyway, and when his tunic and his metal were in a pile by the side of the bed, I proceeded to do them.

When he'd caught his breath again he reached for me, and maybe it was only that it had been two years, but I had to clamp my hand over my mouth to keep from waking everybody in the inn, it was that glorious. Afterward we lay curled up against each other, and I listened to him fall asleep. I guess at some point I fell asleep, too, because when I opened my eyes again, it was morning.

* * *

Guern was waiting for us when we came to his workshop. "It's not anything fancy," he said, jerking his head toward the float-cart he'd rigged for Aquila, "but it should get you there. If you still want to go."

"Oh, I'm going," he said.

"I've got something for you as well," he said to me. I was loading our gear into the back of the cart, but I looked up. "If you're going with him on this fool's venture."

"I'm his slave. I have to go."

Aquila raised an eyebrow at me, and I concentrated on hoisting the sack of bread into the cart so I wouldn't burst out laughing. 

Guern hadn't noticed, which was probably a good thing. He frowned at Aquila. "It seemed as though you trusted him. Am I wrong?"

"I trust him," Aquila said, and I could hear his own repressed laughter in his voice. Guern must have, too, because he looked back at me, then back at Aquila, and his mouth curved into a smile.

"Good. You'll need someone you trust at your back. Someone with more weaponry than just a cutter." Of course he had noticed my mods, what I had and what I didn't; he was a military mech. And he'd noticed the tracery of blue lines on my arm where the beam had been removed when I'd lost in the Arena. "I've got a beam for you."

"How much?" said Aquila.

Guern shook his head. "It's an old one I found on a scrap-heap, fixed it up. I got the parts I needed in trade. So it's just the labor to install, and I'll give you that for free. Since you're going after the Eagle."

It was an old beam, for sure, with squared-off edges and a dull sheen to its metal. But it was solid, decent Q stuff, and I did not believe for one moment he'd found it lying blinky somewhere. I don't think he expected us to believe it, either, but I politely kept my voicebox shut while he wired it in, and I thanked him when he was done. 

It felt good to have something there again. I still hadn't got used to my arm feeling so light and bare. And it was reassuring to have some firepower of my own. If we were going up against the Sealies, he was right: I would need more than just a cutter.

Aquila transmitted our clearance to the guard at the north gate, and we were through. The cart Guern had rigged was a lot slower than the vipsy, so we fit right in with the rest of the traffic coming and going from the Wall. Here on the wild side there wasn't as much as there had been on the civilized side, but the road was still busy enough. Musicians, mechs, builders, and traders passed by in both directions. Occasionally there were families or small clan groups traveling together. But they were all tribesmen. Romebots didn't travel north of the Wall.

So Aquila got some stares, for sure. But usually it was just a matter of a longer look than usual, nothing threatening. For that matter, I got some looks, even though I was clearly a Brig. After a couple of curious glances, I figured it was the mods they were looking at. Most of the people we saw traveling south had even less than what I had. I only counted three optics among maybe fifty people, and a dozen arm-mounted weapons, although there might have been more I couldn't see under sleeves and cloaks. 

Of course there were other kinds of weapons. A few probably had non-integral ones like hand-beams and disrupts tucked away under their cloaks. But a surprising number had weapons that weren't tech at all. Bows and arrows, cudgels, knives. Not much use against a Romebot with a wired-in beam, but I imagine they'd do against wolfry, or for hunting. 

We didn't see any wolfry that day, although that first night we sure heard them howling. We had decided to skirt the ragged-looking village that straddled the crossroads we'd come to after a day's travel; there might have been an inn there, but it wouldn't have been any more comfortable than the place we set up camp, a dip on a ridge against the sheer wall of a cliff. It wasn't quite a cave, but there was enough of an overhang to protect us if it started to rain, and we had enough of a view in the other directions that we would be able to see anyone – or anything – coming.

"We'd better take watches," I said as we laid out our sleeping gear. Aquila had set out a perimeter wire, like we'd done when we'd slept out on the way to the Wall, and of course we both had our aurals tuned to alert us to anything moving close by. But I didn't trust this wild land. Not when there might be wolfry or Picts or even Sealies out there; just because we hadn't seen any yet didn't mean they hadn't seen us. 

"Good idea. And we'd better not do anything that might distract us from potential danger," Aquila said, but then he grinned, and reached out his hand and drew it softly down my side to curl around my hip for an instant. His fingers slid across my body, and I pushed forward slightly, trying for more. "Better not," he said, taking his hand away. "As much as I want to."

"I know." But I leaned toward him and gave him a quick, hard kiss anyway. Then he slid down under his blankets while I sat with my back to the cliff and looked out into the night, listening to the howls of the wolfry.

In the morning, it was drizzling. We ate some bread and cheese from our supplies, packed up our things, and headed down the hill to join the westward fork of the road on the far side of the village. There were fewer travelers on this road, so we had it to ourselves for long stretches. We passed between high hills carpeted with heather, and through forests that seemed darker and more forbidding than any I'd been through before, swirled through with the mist that had come with the rain. 

"I didn't want a mod that might go blinky sometime and leave my leg worse off than before," said Aquila suddenly. We were winding down through a thick forest, towards the river at the bottom of a valley. "I've seen it happen. Unless Rome's making new tech, using the old tech is a dice game. It could fail at any time."

I guessed this was the answer to the question he was tired of answering. It made my skell feel warm, that he wanted to say it to me. But it also made me uneasy. "You think my legs are going to go blinky?"

"Eventually. Maybe not while you've got them."

"They warned me that they might," I said. Of course, I was too young then to really believe they ever would. But I was the third, maybe the fourth generation for these mods, and now that Aquila had mentioned it, I had to agree that he was right, it was a dice game. Somebody would lose eventually, and it might be me. "I guess if they do, I'll just have to sit on that cart with you."

He laughed. "Wouldn't we be a pair then!"

I laughed too. "So what was it that made your leg go blinky?" 

He stopped laughing, and for a moment I thought maybe I'd gone too far. Finally he spoke. "It was an uprising. The tribes staged an attack on the fort where I was stationed."

"The tribes don't love Rome," I said, as neutrally as I could. When I was growing up, we cheered the uprisings, when we got word of them. The Romebots took what they wanted; parted us out on their whim, took our mods, made us slaves. I felt a little proud for the tribes that had dared to attack Aquila's fort. At least they'd done something. 

"No," he agreed. "And you Brigs in particular make it very clear."

I grinned at him. "So they were my people. Good for them. Well, sorry about your leg."

"Believe me, my soldiers extracted full payment. While I was moaning in a ditch thinking I was about to go black, they put down the uprising pretty thoroughly." He shook his head. "I don't know what those Brigs were thinking. Surely they knew that they had no chance to take down a fort like Cambo."

Abruptly my good mood disappeared. "You were in Cambo?"

"Yes. It was my first command, two years ago –"

Two years ago. Two years ago I had journeyed to the Wall on my first solo trading trip, and returned to find my clan gone black and parted out. We had lived in the village just outside Cambo. It had all been Brig territory, once. Now it was Rome – and it was Aquila who had done it.

I leapt at him, knocking him off the cart and hard onto the ground. "You fucking Romebot!" Straddling his body, I grabbed his shoulders and shook him hard. "It was you! You slaughtered my tribe, you son of a bitch!"

"Your tribe tried to –"

I slammed him back against the dirt. "You should have died in that ditch!"

Blood and oil pumped through me like lightning. I was furious, amped to the edges, filled with righteous rage for what he had done to my clan. I clamped my legs hard against his hips, so he couldn't move, and I wrapped my hands around his neck.

But he was a Romebot, and he wasn't going to go down easy. Some kind of field pressed against my hands and my grip weakened; his hands, reinforced with those traceries of metal I'd noticed when I'd met him, easily pushed my weight off him. I rolled to the side, down the hill, and since my legs were still wrapped around his, he came with me.

"You killed my clan!" I shouted at him, pummeling him with my fists. "You killed Cunoval!" 

"I saved your miserable life!" he shouted back. 

"You should have let me die," I spat out. "You should have killed me, too!" 

Because who was I without my tribe? Just a slave. I was the slave of a Roman who turned out to be just like the rest of those fuckers. A Romebot who thought that because they had higher-Q tech, they could rule this rock and all the people on it, and they could do with us as they liked. They could kill us at their whim. They had killed us all.

Cunoval, Beric, Cradoc, Grania, Shula – the names poured out of me with every blow I landed. My eyes were wet with the rain and with my tears. I didn't care whether I hit flesh or metal, I just wanted to damage him, payback for the damage he had done to me and my tribe.

We tumbled down the hill, grabbing and punching at each other, sliding on the wet, slippery grass. My weaponry was worthless in these close quarters, and anyway, it was more satisfying to land my fists against his body. I shoved my shoulder against his aux panel and he got his hand around my arm and yanked it back hard. He ground my face into the mud and I spat it back at him.

We landed hard on the river bank, still wrapped around each other. I'd ended up on top, though, which meant I had the leverage, so I pulled back to hit him again – and saw panic in his eyes. He was looking over my shoulder, and I frowned, thinking he was trying to trap me. Then I heard the footsteps. I rolled off him and looked up.

Sealies. A whole band of them, looking at us. I had never seen one before but I knew what they were instantly: dark skin painted in strange swirly patterns, feathers and metal in their hair, teeth filed down to points. No mods at all, but they wore necklaces made out of wire strung with bits of metal and other tech. I recognized a piece of what must have been an old cutter on one, the curved glass of a broken optic on another.

The one with the most metal in his hair stepped forward – he must have been the chief – and spoke in the language of the tribes and the traders. "Who are you and what do you here?"

"What did he say?" Aquila whispered very softly. Even though his mouth was close to my ear, my aural just barely picked it up. Maybe the Sealies wouldn't have noticed, but I wasn't going to take chances.

I turned to him and hit him hard with the back of my hand. "Shut up!" He stared at me. I looked away, up at the Sealie chief. Then I scrambled to my feet. It hurt; Aquila had hit me as hard as I'd hit him, and we'd bumped quite a few rocks on our way down the hill. 

I looked the Sealie chief in the eye. "I am Esca son of Cunoval, clan chief of the Brigs who was slain by the Romans," I said carefully in the tribal language. Maybe the Sealies wouldn't kill me if they knew I was a fellow tribesman. Maybe.

He nodded. Then he looked down at Aquila, and his face twisted into a sneer of distaste. "And who is this – Roman?"

I took a deep breath. "He is my slave."


	4. Village of the Sealies

We were headed for the Sealie village, although not exactly in the way Aquila had intended. I was walking beside Liathan, who as it turned out was actually the grandson of the Sealie chief, who had remained in the village. They were on their way back from a hunting trip; two of the men carried a boar slung between their spears, meat for the clan, Liathan told me.

He told me a lot of things, and I understood maybe eighty percent. Back before the Invasion, all the tribes on the rock spoke the same language, more or less. We Brigs thought the Cenies sounded like they had sand in their mouths, and the Dumi had different words for lots of things, but it was close enough that we could figure out what was what. 

But by the time I was growing up the Romans had pretty much ensured that everybody living near their cities and forts spoke _their_ language. In the mine, they made us speak the Roman language, so that the overseers and guards knew we weren't plotting anything. In our clan, we spoke the Roman language in the city, or if we encountered Romebot soldiers. At home among ourselves we spoke the tribal language, but there were a lot of Roman words mixed in. But the Sealies, living way up here and not dealing with the Romans at all – their language had changed in the other direction. 

I was lucky, since I had gone on trading missions with Beric, so I got some practice in speaking with people from other tribes who said things differently. It wasn't as hard for me to understand the Sealies as it might have been for someone else.

Aquila, of course, didn't speak a word of it. He didn't need to; he was a Romebot, and they just assumed that anyone with anything worthwhile to say would say it in their language. He didn't know I'd told the Sealies he was my slave. He'd figure it out soon enough.

"Why were you and your slave fighting?" Liathan had asked me.

"He said something insolent," I replied. Then I pulled Aquila to his feet. "Fetch the cart," I told him in his language. It had stopped itself when I'd thrown Aquila from its seat, sensing it had no driver. "And don't talk back." Or they'll kill us both, I thought, but did not say out loud. It was likely that Liathan or one of the other Sealies spoke at least some of the Roman language. Aquila wasn't stupid; he'd know not to use his weapons. Or so I hoped.

Aquila glared at me, but began to trudge up the hill. The steps he took with his injured leg were small and slow, and twice he fell on the wet and slippery grass.

"Your slave does not walk very well," observed one of the Sealies.

I remembered what the one-armed man had said in the holding cell in the Arena. "I like watching him struggle." And at that moment, it was true. The rage still simmered under my aux panel. I was _glad_ that one of my clan had done damage to Aquila's leg; that one of them – Cradoc, perhaps, or Cunoval himself – had scraped that long scar into his flesh. I hoped that scar hurt him now, as he worked his way up the hill toward the lifter cart. I hoped it made him remember my clan, and what he had done to us.

"Where are you bound, Esca son of Cunoval?" asked Liathan.

I thought fast. "I am going to visit kin. I have an aunt in a village on this side of the Wall."

"Which village does she live in?"

Shit. I didn't know the names of any of the villages north of the Wall. "I don't know its name. I only know that to get there you travel west on this road, then north for…" I pretended to think. "Three days? Or was it five?"

He nodded. "I know that place. You take this road one more day to a crossroads, and then north for five days and you come to a village. But first you will come with us to ours, which is a day past the crossroads. My grandfather would like to see a tribesman who uses these things as the Romans do." He indicated the beam on my arm with a flick of his hand, although it seemed to me he was very careful not to actually touch it. Then he looked up the hill. I followed his gaze; Aquila was just reaching the cart. "And he would be very interested to see a Roman who is a slave," he added quietly, as though to himself.

"Bring it here," I called to Aquila. He stared at me for a moment, his face unreadable. Then he climbed into the cart, keyed the lifter, and began descending the hill toward us.

Liathan snorted. "You are very soft-hearted, to allow your slave to ride."

There was a hard edge under his words, and I could sense that being soft-hearted was not a good thing in this world beyond the Wall. "It is convenient for me," I said. "He would not be able to keep up with me were he to walk. And he carries our things."

"You have been walking like a Roman," said Liathan. He pointed at the metal framework that ran down my legs. "You will walk with us like a man. He can keep up. Or he will die."

He sounded matter-of-fact, and I fought the urge to run. We were on shaky ground as it was; there were a dozen Sealies to the two of us, and even though we had the tech, there was no arguing with sheer numbers. The cart was basically a platform on a lifter, so it could be run remotely, just like an ordinary lifter. Guern had showed both of us how to operate it when we'd been in his workshop. 

I shrugged carelessly, as though it didn't really matter. "Fine. We both walk. There is room on the cart for your boar, if your men don't wish to carry it."

"We are not so weak as to need that," grumbled one of the men carrying the boar, but I thought he eyed it enviously. 

"We both walk," I repeated in the Roman tongue when Aquila reached us. 

"You know I can't –"

"We both walk. We're traveling in company now, and we'll go at their speed." I turned so my back was to Liathan and the other Sealies, and touched my ear quickly, hoping Aquila would figure out that I meant for him to amp his aural. Then I spoke as quietly as I could, so that my words were barely audible to my own amped aural. "I told them you were my slave. They're taking us to their village."

His eyes narrowed, and I knew he'd heard me. "I'm no one's slave," he murmured in the same nearly-sub-vocal manner.

"You're my slave, or we're both dead." 

"Is he still being insolent?" said Liathan behind me. "You should punish him."

I could not risk continuing this conversation. Aurals were designed to amplify distant sounds, sure, but there still had to be a sound to amplify. Speaking aloud at any volume was risky when you didn't want others to hear – I'd learned that lesson in the mines. Just because Liathan spoke the trade tongue didn't mean he didn't know Roman. 

I placed a hand on Aquila's chest, and frowned. "I will walk with this man, here, and you will follow with the other men," I said, at normal volume. Aquila winced; he must not have turned down his aural fast enough, and my voice probably boomed like an explosion in his ear. "I will manage the cart."

I stared hard at him, willing him to understand. Finally he nodded. 

* * *

"How is it that a Brig has a Roman for a slave?" asked Liathan as we walked together down the road. I could hear the note of suspicion in his voice. Maybe they didn't know much about Romebots here, but they knew some things. They knew how life was lived south of the Wall, that it wasn't Brigs that had Romans for slaves but the other way around.

"His soldiers attacked my village," I said. "But they were stupid. We outnumbered them, and we killed them and took their mods. Then I found that one in a ditch, clutching his leg and moaning, and I took him for my own, as I was the son of the chief that had been murdered in the attack." It was a mix of truth and invention, but Liathan seemed to accept it.

I could see it in my head as I said it. I imagined Aquila lying in the ditch that surrounded Cambo fort, his leg smashed by Cradoc's cutter, his breathing shallow and fast as the battle raged around him. That much had really happened, according to Aquila. Other than the small fact that we hadn't outnumbered them. They had cut us down, and my whole clan had gone black and been parted out except for me.

As we walked along the road, I turned it all over and over again in my mind. I had been spared because I wasn't there, because Cunoval had sent me off alone on the trading trip. If Aquila was to be believed, the Romebots hadn't cut down the village without provocation. My clan and the other Brig clans had gathered on the field between the village and the fort, and had attacked the fort. 

It had been a stupid thing to do. With all the clans added together, there were probably as many Brigs at Cambo as there were Romebots, which if you didn't know the situation sounded like good odds. Thing was, though, the Romebots were way better armed. They had huge stores of high-Q tech all the way from Rome, which had been the center of innovation back in the Tech Age, back before they got lazy and just coasted on what they'd done in the past. On our rock we only had what our ancestors had brought back, what had been lovingly passed down through the clans, or what we were able to trade for or take as a percentage from a raid. 

And that's why Cunoval had sent me away, I suddenly realized. He'd done it on purpose – he'd known that the chances of winning were small. Why had he even authorized the uprising? Sure, there had been a lot of men in our clan – women, too – who had been amped up with anger at Rome, who had shouted that we had to do something, that we had to fight back. I had agreed with them, in principle, but I hadn't been one of them. I wasn't stupid; I knew it was pointless to throw ourselves against their gates with our few pathetic beams and shooters. Their shields would knock everything aside without using hardly any power at all, and the Romebots would come out with their armor and shields and high-Q weaponry and blast us to shreds.

Which of course was what had happened. Maybe Cunoval had decided he couldn't stand against the voices calling for a rebellion. Or maybe he agreed with them, but sent me away out of – well, it must have been out of sentiment. I wondered if there were more of my clan out there, whose mothers and fathers had sent them to what they had hoped was safety. Safety until the slavers got them, like they got me.

Anger burned through me again as I remembered. But if I was being honest with myself, I couldn't fault Aquila, not if it had been Cunoval and the rest who had started it. And anyway, he'd said he had been injured straight off, had thought he was going black. It had been his men who had slaughtered my clan, not him. 

I looked back at him. He was limping painfully alongside the Sealies who were carrying the boar, sullen and silent, looking straight ahead as though they weren't there. At first the Sealies had stared at him, touched his metal, murmured things in the tribal language which he didn't understand. I hadn't stopped them. I had had enough of that treatment from Romebots; let him enjoy it for a while, I'd thought. But now they were mostly ignoring him, and he returned the favor. 

We came to the crossroads in the early evening. No village here, just a stake and a road angling to the north, or what I thought was probably north. Liathan jerked his head. "Your kinswoman's village is that way. But now we go ahead." 

Shortly after we passed the crossroads, the drizzle finally stopped, but the thick, gray overcast threatened more to come. The air felt damp and it had a faint smell of the sea. I wondered how far we were from the coast. I didn't have a map implant; maybe Aquila did. But I was not going to go to where Aquila stumbled along at the back of the party, and ask. 

After another hour or so, we came to what was obviously a well-used roadside camp, with a large clearing and a stone fire-ring, cold ashes in its center. The Sealies made camp, hanging their boar and cutting off a portion for their meal. I stopped the cart and motioned Aquila over to where I'd decided to set up our own camp.

He looked awful. His blinky leg had given out on him a few times, and he'd fallen in the mud of the road. I'd happened to be looking back once when it had happened; one of the Sealies had grabbed his arm roughly and yanked him to his feet, pushing him forward. I'd half expected him to turn his beam on the man, but he just looked straight ahead, his mouth set in a grim line, and kept moving. 

"What bright idea do you have now?" he muttered. Behind him I saw Liathan eyeing us closely. It would not do to make him suspicious. 

"You will make our camp," I said. "And then you will prepare us our dinner, and serve me."

"Have him serve us as well, and you may have some of our meat," said Liathan. He'd spoken in our trade language, but I'd used the Roman language, speaking to Aquila, and that confirmed my fear that at least some of the Sealies understood it. We would need to be cautious. I should have asked Guern for a transceive mod, so Aquila and I would be able to send privately between us – I'd bet Aquila already had one – but of course the thought that we'd need something like that had never occurred to me.

"You will serve all these men," I told Aquila, gesturing about the camp. My face was impassive. I knew Liathan was watching.

Aquila stared at me a moment, and I held my breath; but then he limped to the cart and began to set up our things. I went to the fire, where the Sealies were sitting and talking among themselves as a joint of meat roasted over the flames. They made room for me in their circle and in their conversation, and when Liathan passed me a skin of fiery liquor I drank my share.

"Here comes your slave," said one of the Sealies, and I looked up to see Aquila slowly making his way toward the fire. "The meat is not ready yet. Tell him he should wait in your camp until we have need of him."

The rain had soaked into our clothing, and it felt good to be close to the fire, letting it dry out. After the long day of walking – he'd probably covered more ground on his own legs in one day than he usually did in two weeks – Aquila's leg probably ached with the damp. I felt sorry for him, a little. But not enough to risk making the Sealies suspicious.

And I had to admit it was nice to sit with them, speaking the tribal language, drinking something that was as different from our own heather beer as it was from Roman wine. They were strange-looking people, and to be honest, they were a bit scary-looking, too. But they were one hundred percent flesh, and it made me wonder if this was what our clan had been like long ago, before the Tech Age rose and fell. Before the Romebots came.

I lifted my head and repeated in the Roman tongue what the Sealie had said, and Aquila looked at me for a moment and then walked back to the cart.

"When we sleep we will tie him to a tree, so he won't run," said one of the Sealies.

"He can't run, that one!" said another, and they all laughed.

"He won't run," I said. I hoped I was right.

* * *

"How dare you tell them I was your slave?" Aquila lay beside me under the tarp he'd strung from the tree, his lips near my ear. 

I had been on the brink of apologizing to him for forcing him to walk on his blinky leg, for forcing him to sit in the damp cold, away from the fire; but at the hard tone of his voice – I could hear it even in his quiet whisper —all my sympathy for him vanished. He still thought he was the master, and I the slave; he was still a Romebot, after all.

I turned so I could speak just as quietly in his ear. "Did you want them to kill us both? We're going to their village – isn't that what you wanted, to go to the Sealie villages?"

"Not like this."

"We don't always have a choice."

He was silent for a while. I wondered if he was thinking about Cambo. It was a gulf lying between us, an expanse of wasteland that neither of us wanted to be the first to set foot in: his admission that he had led the charge that had killed my clan, my white-hot anger, our fight. I knew I should tell him that I was halfway to forgiving him, that I understood that he hadn't had a choice then. Maybe I would have, if I had been all metal and circuitry, evaluating the world through optics and aurals and the pure logic of machines. But the flesh in me still hated what had been done to us; the flesh in me still hated Rome. So I kept my mouth shut as well, and after a time we both fell asleep.

In the morning we packed up our things – or rather, Aquila packed up our things while I ate cold meat and biscuits, and talked with Liathan about the likelihood of more rain. I pressed a few biscuits into Aquila's hand when the Sealies turned away to attend to their own gear. I thought of it as a peace offering, but he only glared at me. 

We set off along the road again: Liathan and me in the lead, the rest of the men following us, Aquila limping along behind them. The Sealies had finally decided it wouldn't reflect badly on their manhood to let the lifter cart carry the boar, and had slung it onto the platform. The problem was that this meant they could walk faster, and Aquila couldn't move that fast. When I glanced back I saw that one of the Sealies had tied a rope around Aquila's wrists and was pulling him along, forcing him to keep up.

"A problem?" asked Liathan when he saw me looking at them and frowning. 

I forced a smile. "No problem. But I do not want them to damage my property. If he becomes useless to me I will be angry."

About an hour before sunset the Sealie warriors began chattering among themselves and picked up the pace of their march, and I knew we must be nearing their village. I don't know what I was expecting, maybe mud huts, but from a distance it could have been one of our own villages. It wasn't until we got close that the differences were obvious.

It wasn't that they had no tech at all. There was tech everywhere, personal mods they must have taken off Romebots who had been unlucky enough to get too close, and some big stuff like city lights hanging from the roofs of the buildings, and a tower clock that must have come from a raid on a village south of the Wall. The Sealies had parted out a lot of poor suckers, and their mods were all over the place. 

But they were just decorations. The tower clock's face was blank, and when the sun went down the city lights didn't go on. And then there was the weird shit: cutters and transmitters and big panels of metal embedded in walls, wires braided around stone pillars like some kind of climbing vine, a haphazard collection of tech – half a pump, an upside-down transmitter, valves and panels I couldn't identify – stacked on a plinth in front of a big hall that must have been an important building. 

Sealie kids came swarming out to greet us, brown-limbed naked children with feathers and wires in their braided hair, trailed by barking dogs that looked to be half wolfry. They looked at my metal with open curiosity. A couple of the boys whispered to each other; then one ran up to me and touched one of my leg panels with the tip of his finger before darting off again with a warning from Liathan to show the visitor respect.

Some of the kids gathered around the cart, and a couple of the bolder ones climbed up on it, laughing. But it was Aquila they were really curious about. I had mods, sure, but I was still more flesh than metal, and I was walking next to Liathan, talking with him, clearly an equal. Aquila was stumbling along at the end of a rope, his clothes torn and muddy, and every bit of his metal screamed his identity as Roman.

The children reached up to touch him, tentatively at first, then more boldly when none of the Sealies intervened. Liathan wasn't about to tell them to show _him_ respect. They rapped on his metal with their knuckles, yanking at the exposed wires and hydraulics on his mods. I watched warily, hoping Aquila had the sense not to –

Shit. One of the girls had grabbed at his beam, and Aquila snapped his arms toward her, sending her stumbling to the ground. Instantly the other children, as well as the Sealies, fell silent; all but a thin, wavering wail from the girl which she quickly stifled, her hand to her mouth.

Liathan whirled and strode back to Aquila. "What did you do to my sister?" 

Shit, shit, shit. I pushed my way through the Sealies and grabbed Aquila by the shoulders, forcing him to the ground. "Kneel. Get on your knees! Do it!"

His face was unreadable behind his optic, but I could feel the cold fury of his glare, even so. Don't be an idiot, I thought fiercely at him, hoping he could feel the furious pressure of my fingers against the metal of his aux panel. After a long moment he dropped to his knees and lowered his chin.

"These Romans are barbarians," said one of the other Sealies. Liathan spat toward Aquila, and I took a gamble.

"If it please you," I said, stepping back, "kill him."

"He is your property. It is for you to kill him."

I grabbed Aquila's shoulder with my left hand and jammed my new beam under his chin; it looked every bit the weapon it was, big and clunky and evil. "Then I will kill him." 

Aquila couldn't know what I had said, but my tone had clearly given it away. His shoulders tensed, and he shifted on the ground. I suppose he was preparing to run, although he must have known he wouldn't get far. I tightened my grip. 

"But I will miss having a slave," I mused, as though it had just occurred to me. "He may not look it, but I find him useful. If you can forgive his stupidity, I will discipline him and make sure he does no more offense to your people."

Liathan turned his gaze toward me, and I felt a chill down my skell. I wondered if he guessed at the truth. If so, we'd both be going black, Aquila and I. By now more Sealies had come out of the buildings and watched us silently.

Then he shrugged negligently and turned away. "On your word, he may live."

I released Aquila. "Offend our hosts again, and you'll go black before you know what's happened to you." I hoped he understood what I meant. It wasn't just _his_ life at stake.

"When I get the chance," he muttered, "I will kill you."

I pretended not to hear him. Other Sealies were approaching now. 

"How was the hunt?" an older man asked Liathan. He was wrinkled with age and his hair was gray, but he held himself as erect as a young man. He had almost as many bits of tech braided into his hair and hanging on strings around his neck as Liathan did, and when he glanced at me his gaze was sharp and thoughtful.

"It was a good hunting, grandfather."

"Who are these people you bring to our village?"

"This is Esca, son of Cunoval, a Brig from the south. And his Roman slave."

"A Brig, eh? Not so many of those around. And it has been a long time since we have seen a Roman." He looked at Marcus Aquila appraisingly. I wondered whether he was considering how his mods would look decorating his hair or his house, or whether he was remembering Aquila's father. Had these been the Sealies who had shot him down and parted him out?

"My father was clan chief," I said. "I took this one in the battle in which he died."

"Ah. Well, he can go with the other slaves," said the old man. From his manner I realized he must be the Sealie chief. He waved a hand toward a man who wore no ornaments and simple clothes, who hurried over to take charge of Aquila, and then he turned back to me. "Come with us to the feasting-hall, and we shall eat this fine boar that my grandson has brought back to our village." He gave me a crafty look. "That is, if there is still enough of you that is human enough to need food."

"I am still human, and very hungry," I said, and he laughed and started toward the largest of the buildings. Liathan and I followed. Most of the children and the men who had been with us had dispersed, and some women had taken the meat to another building, presumably to cook it. I looked back to make sure Aquila was doing what he'd been told, and was unsurprised to see him following me even though the man – he must have been one of the Sealie slaves – was tugging tentatively at his sleeve.

"You are to go with this man," I said to him.

"Esca," he said hoarsely. He was looking past me, toward the feasting-hall. Not at the hall, I realized as I followed his gaze; his optic was trained high on the stacked column of tech in front of it. "It's there, Esca. The Eagle. I see it."

Liathan and the chief stopped as they were about to enter the hall, and Liathan began to turn back toward me. They must have been wondering why I wasn't there with them. I made a quick decision: I reached out and slapped Aquila hard across the face.

"We will talk of that later, slave. Now you are to go with this man. And if you defy me again, you will be punished."

He looked at me with that same unreadable expression; then he bowed his head, and let the slave lead him away.

* * *

The dense, smoky air in the feasting-hall made my eyes water almost as much as the liquor being poured into my cup as fast as I drank it. Which wasn't very fast; it would be dangerous to lose my wits here, I knew. The Sealie chief asked me question after question: what did this mod do, how did this other one work, why my slave had an optic when I had none. And, of course, in a dozen different ways: how was it that a Brig had a Roman for a slave?

I told him the same story I'd told Liathan, and he nodded and grunted, but I wasn't sure he'd been convinced. "It is one thing to best your enemy in battle because you are the stronger man," he said. "Perhaps once the Romans were men, but they are no longer." He looked pointedly at the bulky beam Guern had wired into my arm.

"It's folly to deny yourself the advantage your enemy has taken for himself." 

" _We_ do not need such things. To us they are only trophies." He pointed at a bright bit of something in the garland of tech around his neck.

"The Roman tech is useful to us."

"It makes you forget you are a man. When the Romans come to our land, we best them with arrows from our bows and stones from our slings. We need no metal to kill them."

"I have heard a story," I said carefully. "I have heard of a flying man you shot out of the sky."

His eyes brightened. "Aie! That was a fine day! I was an old man even then, and it was my last fight, but _what_ a fight! Our warriors were fewer in number than the Romans, yet they scattered like frightened hares. The flying one, now, he was brave – for a Roman. He sent lightning from his hands down to kill us, but our men fired arrow after arrow, stone after stone.

"When he crashed to the ground the others – those who had not fled – gathered around him. But we broke their shield-wall, even though they slew three of our bravest warriors, and we took his shining parts for our trophies. I will show you them in the morning."

"Your warriors are indeed very brave, to go up against a flying man with lightning in his hands."

"The flying one was no man," he said dismissively. "When we took his wings and his lightning, and all the other metal parts from his body, there was not enough flesh left to make a meal for a wolfry."

"Well, I am still a man," I said. "And I would keep my metal parts, and my flesh as well."

He cocked his head and looked at me for a long, uncomfortable moment. "Perhaps you should fight one of our warriors. Your Roman metal against our human might."

That was exactly what I _didn't_ want. Either I went black under some Sealie's savage stone-throwing, or I zapped one of my hosts with a beam – and all the Sealies would be after me. Lose-lose, with no way out, and no way to politely decline.

"My grandson, perhaps," he continued. To his credit, Liathan looked as uncomfortable as I felt. Then the old man laughed. "Hah! No, I would not have you fight. Here," he said, pushing my cup toward me. "Drink and eat now, and in the morning I will show you what we have taken from the Romans."

I tipped the fiery drink to my lips and took the smallest of sips. If they were drinking as much as I was pretending, I thought, they'd all be snoring on the floor within another hour. It took rather longer than that, but eventually I was able to slip out of the hall on the pretext of taking a piss – "Hah! Is it piss that comes out of your prick, or oil?" said the chief, but his words were slurred and his eyelids half-closed – and nobody followed me out.

There were no lights on in the village other than the glow of hearth-fires; it was weird to see the familiar glass globes on posts and strung from the roofs, dark and vacant. The stars were pinpricks that did not do much to light my path, and I stumbled cautiously among the buildings along the edge of the central square, trying to be silent.

The slave hut was obvious by its condition; it was the most dilapidated of the buildings, and there were no tech trophies displayed on its walls. I crept inside and tried to make out Aquila's form in the dimness, wishing again I still had my optic.

A stray glint of light reflecting from his metal gave him away. I put a hand on his shoulder, and he startled awake. Then he recognized me, and I could see his panic turn first to ease, then to wariness.

I bent close to his ear. "It's time."

Quietly we made our way out of the slave hut. By now my eyes had adjusted to the darkness, but I was still grateful Aquila had an optic. "Is it clear?" I murmured.

He scanned the square. "Yeah." 

I started to walk toward the feasting-hall, but he stopped me with a hand on my arm. "I thought I'd lost you."

I grinned at him. "Not that easy to do. Come on."

We both had our aurals amped for any noise from the hall, but pretty much it was all snoring, with the occasional retching from the back. Even the wolfry-dogs were quiet; they'd been given the boar's bones and offal, and were sleeping off their unaccustomedly rich meal. 

Aquila's cutter was higher-Q than mine, and anyway, he knew what it was he was looking for. I boosted him onto my shoulders so he could reach the Eagle; naturally, it was at the top of the column, and he was damn heavy. The cutter whined. I hoped nobody in the Sealie village was alert enough to notice the sound.

Every moment that passed made me more nervous. The cutter's vibrations passed down through Aquila's metal and into mine. It felt like tiny bubbles fizzing through my blood and oil, and it took all my strength just to stand there and let Aquila work, instead of running off at the highest speed my legs could manage.

Finally the vibrations stopped. "It's done," whispered Aquila. His voice was as shaky as I felt. I lowered him down, and he stepped from my aching shoulders to the ground.

Then the door of the feasting-hall opened, and a bleary-looking Liathan stepped out. "Esca, are you –" 

Our eyes met, and he fell silent. He regarded us for a moment, me and Aquila; he probably couldn't make out my features, since he'd just come from the fire-lit hall, but I could see his. Anger and disappointment warred on his face, along with a strange sort of resignation, as though he'd expected all along that I would betray him.

For a moment, I felt guilty. For all the ferocity of his appearance, he had been a good companion on the road. He'd probably be scolded by his grandfather for being so gullible as to be taken in by our act. In another world – one without Romebots, without Aquila – we might have become friends.

Then he lifted the necklace of mod fragments to his lips, and a piercing whistle split the silence, limiting out my aural for a brief moment. The dogs began to bark, and when my ears came back on-line I could hear curses from the feasting-hall, and men stumbling to their feet.

I grabbed Aquila and slung him over my shoulders as though he were a sack of ore and I a mine-slave again. His weight made me stagger, but my leg mods had been the pride of our clan, and I knew they could take it, even if my neck and shoulders were already sore. 

"Hang on to me, and to your Eagle," I told him grimly. And then I ran.


	5. Escape

By the time the eastern sky began to lighten, my whole body felt like it was about to go blinky, mods and flesh both. I hurt from the back of my neck to the tips of my toes; my legs hurt from running, and my skell hurt from carrying Aquila's damn heavy weight, and every bit of me was on the sharp edge of panic that the Sealies would run us down at any moment.

We'd rested half a dozen times, Aquila climbing off to give me a break. After the first time, he'd shifted position so that he was on my back, his legs clasped around my waist and his arms wrapped around my chest. It helped to have him holding on, so I didn't have to hold him, but it didn't make him any lighter. Every time we started up again it seemed as though he'd become heavier, though I knew it was only me tiring.

I must have grumbled aloud, or said something, anyway. The third time we stopped he stripped off his metal and tossed it into the high weeds by the side of the road. Nothing integral, not even his aux panel cover, but the armor over the flesh of his upper arms, the armor that had hid the twisted scar on his leg; all the metal that made him into a Romebot.

"Your metal," I said dumbly.

"You don't need to carry it."

I knew what that cost him – not just in creds, but in his pride – and I said nothing more. I liked him better as a human being than as a Romebot, and anyway, it was easier to carry him without the extra metal. But each time we got started again, I knew I was moving more slowly. 

Every time we stopped, there was a long moment in which we did nothing but catch our breath. Then we amped our aurals, listening for the howls of the wolfry-dogs behind us. The first few times, they seemed farther away – my legs were that good, even carrying Aquila – but then they got closer, and closer still.

Finally the barks and howls were too close. I couldn't outrun them. But I knew there was no way the Sealies could be moving that fast, so we waited as the exciting barking drew ever nearer.

Pretty soon they came into view: the three largest of the Sealie hounds, mangy animals that looked more wild than not. That was what saved us. Tame dogs would have waited for their masters, would have run back and forth to let them know their quarry had been cornered. But these ran straight up to us, teeth bared, and we zapped them with our beams right down their open throats.

We'd stuck to the road since I could move faster on its smooth surface than over open country. Aquila only had to give me directions a few times, when he saw something with his optic I couldn't make out in the darkness. But neither of us liked leaving a straight trail.

And now that the sun was beginning to lighten our path, it was clear the trail was being followed ever more closely. When we stopped for another break and amped our aurals, we could just hear the sounds of more wolfry-dogs – and the footsteps of the Sealies. They were slowing, but not enough; the chase was gaining on us. 

My legs were losing juice, and we were both tiring – me from the running, and Aquila from hanging on. I stretched and bent, trying to shake out the pain. My shoulders hurt worse than they ever did back in the mines, or maybe I just wasn't used to it any more. Maybe living with Aquila back in C-town had turned me soft, and now I didn't have what it took, right when it mattered most. I couldn't outrun the Sealies, not with Aquila on my shoulders.

He must have been thinking the same, because he put a hand on my arm. "Go. Save yourself. Without me, you've got a chance."

I laughed, though it sounded hollow in my own ears. "Right. Assuming the Sealies don't get me and I make it to the Wall, the Romebots will see me as an escaped slave and throw me in the Arena again."

His hand slid around my arm to my comm port and he transmitted a databurst. "Not any more. I can't contact Central from here, but that code should do it when you're back in range, on the other side of the Wall." I stared at him, and he added, gently, "You're free, my friend. Take it."

Free. I breathed in, out again. I didn't feel any different. I still didn't want to leave him. But maybe it made sense – if we wanted to live.

I tilted my chin toward the Eagle, which he still clutched tightly under his arm. "You fought for it, and now you're going to let them take it back?"

"I've still got some fight left."

I grinned at him. "Me, too. Let's see if we can lose them." We were at a place where the road crossed a streambed, and I pointed upstream, inland toward the hills. "The water should hide your scent. Maybe you can find a place to hole up."

"What about you?"

"I'm going to lay a false trail. With any luck, they'll be halfway to the Wall before they figure out we're not on the road any longer."

He looked at me for a long moment – maybe too long, considering how close the Sealies were – and then he nodded, and turned off the road and stepped into the river.

Immediately, I took off running. Without Aquila on my shoulders, I could muster more speed, and I used every bit of it. At places where unpaved tracks took off to one side or another, or where a ridge made a possible path, I ran a short ways along them before doubling back, hoping it would confuse the wolfry-dogs. Soon I hit the crossroads we'd passed with the Sealies, where Liathan had told me I'd go north to find the village of my imaginary kinswoman, and I turned and took that road for a while before doubling back to the main one. 

Unburdened, I'd been able to gain ground on the Sealies, but I knew they were still coming. I retraced my path for as long as I dared, stopping to amp my aural and listen for signs of their approach every so often. I had not yet reached the river where I'd left Aquila when I heard not just the howls of their dogs but the steady footfalls of men. It sounded like a large group, and I hoped it was all of them – that Aquila hadn't given himself away somehow, through a noise or his scent. I hoped he'd made it away safely, found some refuge.

I retraced my steps again to the last river crossing, then pushed my way upriver and huddled in the bushes. If they'd missed Aquila, maybe they would miss me, too. If they didn't follow my false trail…but I heard them pass by, staying on the road, and I exhaled in shaky relief. 

I forced myself to wait for several long minutes after they passed, since I didn't want to take the risk that they'd hear me and turn around. I counted my heartbeats and wished again that I still had my clock circuit. When the sounds of the Sealie band had faded away, I crept back to the road. I made my way back toward the river where I'd left Aquila, then headed after him.

When I caught up with Aquila, he looked about as bad as I felt. He must have lost his footing a time or two on the slippery river rocks; his clothes dripped water, and he had a long gash on his thigh – near the old, ugly scar – where a jagged rock or sharp-ended twig had cut it open. But he smiled when he saw me.

"I wasn't sure I'd see you again," he said, and for a moment I felt a flash of anger; after all this time, he still didn't trust me? Hadn't I proved I had as much honor – or more – as any Romebot? But then he reached out and stroked my aching leg gently, and added, "I was afraid they'd catch you. I could hear them on the road."

I closed my eyes, then opened them again. We were both tired. He hadn't meant what I thought. "I'm all right. I ducked into another river when they passed on the road. But I don't know how long they'll be fooled."

He pointed upriver, where the hills rose into craggy cliffs. "I spotted a cave up on the right bank where we can hide until they give up looking for us."

Or until they find us, I thought but didn't say. I peered at the cliff; all I could see was a slightly darker area among the lighter gray rocks. From here it looked like the shadow of the cliff's overhanging edge. I couldn't make out the cave at all. Aquila must have been scanning hard with his optic amped all the way to max.

We stumbled up the river, leaning on each other for support, then clambered up a short ramp of mossy rocks into the cave's broad, dark mouth. I was close to running out of juice, and Aquila, who had eaten only gruel with the slaves while I was feasting with the Sealies, must have been even hungrier. We were wet from the river, shivering with cold, mud and blood spattering our legs. It didn't matter. We crawled into the cave, curled up against each other for warmth, and within moments I, at least, was fast asleep.

* * *

When I woke, the midday sun was just coming through the cave entrance, and the water droplets which clung to the hanging moss sparkled like little lights. Aquila was a warm weight against my side, the Eagle still cradled protectively in his arms. 

I raised myself on my arms so I could look over at him. In sleep, his face looked younger, more open, more vulnerable, and with his arms and legs bare of Romebot armor, he looked smaller and very human. His dark hair fell across his face, softening the lines of optic and aural; I wanted to reach out and run my fingers through it, but I didn't want to wake him. His chest rose and fell, gently swelling with each quiet inhale and exhale. 

As I watched him, the rhythm of his breathing caught, changed. His eyes fluttered open, and he met my gaze. "You're awake."

"Just woke up a moment ago."

"You're alive. We're alive." He reached up to caress my cheek. "A fine thing it is, to be alive."

"A fine thing," I echoed. And then I couldn't help myself; I pulled him hard against me and found his mouth with mine. He reached for me and held me to him as tightly as he'd held the Eagle, his grip hard on my arms like a pack of wolfry couldn't make him let go.

I shoved his cloak from his shoulders, pulled off his tunic and threw it onto the Eagle. I bared his skin and metal, my lips following the path my fingers cleared. 

Closing his eyes, he let out a soft moan. "You know they are still after us."

"I know," I whispered, and undid the waistband of his trousers. He was as hard as I was. 

He pulled off my clothes and slid his fingers down my aux panel, tracing a path to my hips. His flesh was warm and his hands sure. His fingers curled around my cock; his mouth moved across my skin. I touched whatever of him I could reach, flesh and metal both. It was all wonderful, because it was all Aquila. Marcus. 

There had been so much we hadn't been able to say to each other over the past few days, after the Sealies had found us fighting on the road. Now we spoke with our bodies, our hands and our lips, and we told each other everything. Nothing else seemed to matter.

Our first time, in the inn by the Wall, had been quick and urgent. We hadn't known then what we might be facing in the days ahead, and it had felt like our only chance. Now we had the gift of a second time; but we also had the sure knowledge that we were on the thin edge of survival, the wolfry slavering at our heels. Perhaps it made things all the sweeter, knowing what waited for us around the corner.

The Sealies might come any moment and that would make an end of us both. But if it was going to come to that, then this was how I wanted to spend the last of my uptime. When Marcus slid down and took me in his mouth, it felt better, more piercingly real, than any time I'd been touched before, by anyone. All I could think was that if the last thing I felt before going black was Marcus' mouth on my cock, it would be worth it. If the last thing I heard was his voice murmuring my name as he spilled into my hands, it would be all right. 

But the next thing I heard, after my name on his lips, was not the thunk of a Sealie weapon hitting home, but the more prosaic rumble of Marcus' stomach; a moment later, mine answered it, and we both laughed.

"I'll gather firewood if you find us dinner," Marcus said as he got to his feet, pulling his tunic back over his bare skin. I reached for my clothes as well; it was cool in the cave, away from the warmth of his body. "I recall you claimed to be a pretty good hunter." He took two steps toward the mouth of the cave, then froze. When I amped my aural, I could hear it too; footsteps approaching below us, a slow but steady stride that was partly muffled by the vegetation. One man, perhaps a scout. I pointed my beam toward the cave entrance.

With my eyes adjusted to the dark of the cave, all I could see of the world outside was a pale wash of gray sky fringed with dark mossy green. I watched, tense, as Marcus took another cautious step, peering out into the shiny brightness.

Abruptly he relaxed, his skell softening with visible relief. "It's okay," he murmured to me over his shoulder; then he turned back to the cave entrance and took a final step out into the sunlight.

"Well met, Guern the mech."

* * *

"So you have it," Guern said. He regarded the mod – the Eagle – with satisfaction. "Now to ensure you will keep it."

"How did you track us here?" I asked suspiciously.

He tapped the beam on my arm, the one he'd wired into me at the Wall. "Locator circuit. As long as you were still on the rock, I knew where you were."

Anger surged through me. Rome put locators in runaway slaves they'd recaptured, to make sure they couldn't run again. If I hadn't been sent to the Arena – if I'd gone back to the mines – maybe one would have been installed in me. There were a lot of locator circuits left in Rome's tech hoard, but not enough for every runaway; rumor was that they installed the circuit, then worked the slave hard, so he'd go black and they could retrieve it when they parted him out. 

I suppose if Rome had been making new tech, they would have been able to build as many locator circuits as they wanted. They'd have put them in all their slaves, put one in me from the beginning. I'd never have been able to run.

That made me pause to consider the cause I'd given myself to. I'd helped Marcus retrieve the Eagle for the purpose of learning to create new tech. Was I making it worse for my people – those of my people who were left? By helping him, had I become a traitor?

But after a moment's thought, the answer was clear. I hadn't pledged myself to Rome – I had pledged myself to Marcus. And that loyalty was what Guern had been thinking of when he installed the locator circuit along with the beam. He hadn't wanted to track me down as a runaway slave; I wasn't the important one here. Guern had wanted to be able to find Marcus Aquila, and he knew that wherever he was, I would be with him.

And it seemed to me that Marcus was not so dedicated to the cause of Rome that he would follow it blindly. He was loyal to his father, and to the shining ideal of new tech. Maybe that was part of why I was loyal to him.

Grudgingly, I nodded. "So, what's your percentage?"

Marcus looked appalled, but Guern only smiled. "This is it." He reached for the Eagle, which Marcus relinquished into his hands – reluctantly, I thought. "This was my project as much as it was Flavius Aquila's. I want to see it work. I want to see Marcus fly."

"So you've solved the interference problem?" Marcus asked.

"Maybe. I've brought some shielding that might do it. But if I can't fix it, you will. You've got your father's smarts and his drive to create. I'll install it – assuming you still want it?"

"I want it."  


"Good. Then we get you and the Eagle back to civilized territory. I trust you to do the rest."

I frowned. "Exactly how are we supposed to get it back over the Wall without getting shot down by the Sealies? They can't be too far away by now. And they weren't too pleased that we took their trophy."

Guern extended his left arm and a panel on the back of his wrist slid open, revealing a screen, like the helmet screen on the Romebot grunts but smaller. On the screen were eight glowing dots, all slowly converging on a larger glowing dot at the center. "What's left of Flavius Aquila's men. Those who are still alive. And who still care about our old mission – or who are embarrassed enough by what happened eight years ago to want to make things right."

"And what's _their_ percentage?"

Guern smiled thinly. "That, my friend, was paid long ago. Now it's time for them to earn it."

I went down to the river with Guern and helped him carry the things he had brought with him on his traveling cart up to the cave. There was bread and cheese, which Marcus tore into as soon as I set it in front of him – I'd already eaten my half of it on the way up from the river. There was an op table which unfolded from a bit of metal no larger than my two hands, and a set of connectors and clamps that nested cleverly in a small box. A larger box held a bewildering variety of wires and tubes and flat strands of metal.

"You need all this?"

"Maybe. It's a delicate install, and no doubt the unit was damaged when it was…removed." To his credit, Marcus didn't flinch at that. "May I?"

Marcus gave the Eagle to him, and he examined it closely with his optic. A probe extended from one of his working fingers and delicately slotted into a socket on the edge of the Eagle. I heard the soft hum of low-frequency vibration.

"It's still integral, that's good," said Guern as he withdrew the probe. "It's the aux connections we'll have to repair. I can add new tabs, and I brought one of the spare wiring harnesses."

"Will it still work?" Marcus asked.

"It had better," said Guern grimly. He handed the Eagle to me. "Here, Esca, hold this for a moment. Marcus, take off your aux panel cover. I need to see what you've got for a matrix and run some connectors."

While Guern did whatever it was he needed to do, I turned the Eagle over in my hands. This was the first time I'd actually held it. It seemed oddly small and light, a strange thing to be fighting over. It was made from thin, springy metal and looked like a stubby T with a notch in the middle; the short, thick upright was beveled on both sides, while the crosspiece curved forward like a quarter-section of pipe, and was beveled only at the front, with thick ends. Its bottom edge flared slightly in a convex hollow, and when I held it to my eye and squinted, I saw dark and light rods, and what looked like the nozzles of miniature beams, and bits of a colored substance I couldn't identify at all. I also saw, engraved at the edge of the Eagle's underside, two tiny letters: IX. Not a Roman word, or at least not one I knew.

"Ix," I said experimentally. "Ix. What does that mean?"

"Not ix, nine," Guern said, without looking away from Marcus' chest. "It's the old-style way of writing numbers, from the original Rome that used to be, long ago."

"There's more than one Rome?" I asked, astonished.

"There was. Long ago. When all of humanity lived on one rock."

I couldn't imagine. But it made me wonder, if there was once a different Rome that no longer existed, if maybe one day the Rome I knew wouldn't exist, either. Maybe the people back then thought their Rome would never die, just like we Brigs and Ceni and Dumi thought Rome would part us all out and keep going on our bones and metal. But it had happened once. Maybe it would happen again.

"I'll take that now," said Guern, breaking into my thoughts, and I gave the Eagle back to him. "You can put your panel back on now," he added to Marcus.

Marcus closed his aux panel, but not before I caught a glimpse of what was underneath. I'd seen him naked from the waist up before – I'd seen him completely naked not half an hour before – but I'd never seen him with his aux circuits bare and open. Romebots never exposed their circuits, and even we rarely opened our panels in front of others unless they were mechs. It was as strange to see him that way as it had been to see him without his leg armor that first time. His metal gone, his circuits bare, he didn't look much like a Romebot any more. Then the panel slid back in place, and he was himself again.

Guern placed the Eagle on the op table. Flicking on one of his handlights, he plucked a mesh of fine wires from his parts box and got to work. Marcus and I watched, fascinated, as his special-purpose mods flashed in and out of his hands. Occasionally he pulled a tool from a box and fitted it to himself like a piece of aux armor, but mostly everything he needed was already wired in. 

He worked quickly but with obvious care, and when he had finished he refolded the op table so it was only half-height, then turned to Marcus. "Now for the difficult part. Sit here, facing away from me." His eyes went unfocused for a moment, like he was checking an internal datastream, and when he unlinked he shook his head. "We don't have much time," he added. I wondered whether the Sealies had found Flavius Aquila's men, the ones represented by the glowing dots Guern had showed us. Would there be any left to protect us, when the time came? 

Marcus climbed onto the op table as directed. Guern leaned over him and his hands became tools again. Then he looked up at me again. "Hold him still. I can't use a neural block for this."

I nodded. I remembered the pain when my legs had been installed. The true cybermods, the ones that needed two-way feedback with your organic parts, couldn't be installed under block. It was part of their price. 

I gripped Marcus' arms as Guern's mods whirred across the skin of his shoulders. This install was clearly a lot more complicated than the minor wiring he'd done to put the new clamp-on beam on my arm. Slowly the delicate tracery of metal took shape, a rough and stubby T, like the Eagle. I could feel Marcus flinching and tensing under my fingers as the network built and the tabs went in, but he didn't move, and he didn't cry out. 

He did grab at my hand once, when Guern's integral cutter made the slits for the base of the T, right down his skell. His blood oozed out, thick and red and slow and smelling like death.

"Not so tight, Esca," Marcus ground out, and I realized I was squeezing his hand even harder than he was squeezing mine.

"Sorry." But I didn't let go, and he didn't let me go, and we stayed like that until Guern slotted the last tab into place and pressed the Eagle into his skin. 

The bottom edge of the crossbar flared bright for a fraction of a second, then subsided to a dim but steady glow. Slim metal strips extended from the thick ends of the crossbar. Their undersides had a weird glow as well, which looked like it wasn't quite attached to the rest of the mod; it was hard to focus on, and I was glad when they retracted and the Eagle became just another bit of metal on Marcus' shoulders.

Marcus sucked in his breath and then let it out slowly. "Wow. I feel it." He shifted his shoulders experimentally, rolling them in place. He reached for his tunic, but Guern shook his head.

"You can operate it covered, but it'll rip right through the cloth like a beam. Your father had custom metal fit against it."

"He did this nine times?" Marcus sounded appalled and amazed, and I couldn't blame him.

"Three. The first versions were tested on slaves." Guern glanced at me, maybe apologetically. "But yes, I installed and removed them. I'm sure it hurt. He knew it would. You've probably got a month or two if you want to remove it easy. After that, it's going to hurt a lot more. But find a mech you trust. You should be able to reprogram it internally, and you might be able to add more wiring or shielding just by taking off the cover." He pressed two fingers against a spot just below Marcus' neck; a panel slid open, then closed. "Well, I think you're done."

"Maybe he is, but I'm not," I said, and Guern turned to look at me. I held out my arm, the one with the beam. "Take it out."

He didn't pretend not to understand. He opened up the blocky casing, then deftly unwired a tiny circuit from inside the beam and held it out to me.

"I don't want it," I said. I didn't even want to look at it. He nodded and dropped it into his parts box. 

He closed the casing, and I flexed my arm, sensing the power of the beam. And I had a feeling I was going to need it; I could just make out faint shouts and cries at the limit of my aural. "They're coming."

Guern's eyes went unfocused as he consulted his data feed again, and when he looked at us again, his brow was creased with worry. "Galba's down. They're getting closer." He tapped Marcus' comm port, transmitted something. "The key to my workshop locker at the Wall, and my notes and plans from the Eagle project. I've left your vipsy there, too." He was speaking more rapidly now. "Your beam should work. Your shields maybe, maybe not. I don't know about your other circuits."

I had edged up to the mouth of the cave. The noise of the battle was getting louder. Cautiously, I peered out.

The Sealies were on the river banks, and there were lots of them – more than just the men from the village we'd visited. They were armed with bows and arrows, rocks and slings. As I watched, a beam sizzled out from behind a clump of trees, taking several of them down; the rest swarmed toward the trees, shouting battle cries which chilled my blood and oil.

Another beam from behind the trees, followed by an odd crackling bolt of energy which not only felled the rushing Sealies but set small fires in the grass at their feet. It didn't matter. Despite the beams and bolts taking the first rank down there were always more behind them, and they kept coming, advancing on the trees, howling their uncanny war-chant.

The lead Sealies reached the trees. Voices rose in triumph, and I knew that one more of Guern's dots had vanished.

"It's time," said Marcus, from just behind me, and I turned. The shining curve of the Eagle on his shoulder flowed into his aux panel, but other than that he was bare from the waist up. 

"Good luck," said Guern.

"I guess I'll see you at the Wall," I said to Marcus. I would join the remnants of his father's men, do whatever I could to pick off the Sealies, help give Marcus a chance to escape. I didn't think I'd make it, but I wasn't going to say that out loud. Maybe he would make it, anyway. I hoped so.

He clasped me in an embrace, and I returned it, my arms going around his bare back, my cheek resting against the metal on his shoulder. I released him, but he still held me to his chest. "Oh, no," he murmured into my ear. His arms tightened around me. "Have you forgotten already? You go where I go."

Then he stepped out of the cave, and slowly we flew straight up into the sky.


	6. Apart From Rome

Of course the Sealies weren't going to let us go that easy. We were spotted almost immediately; Liathan's whistle split the air again, and thirty savage heads with pointed teeth swiveled in his direction, and then, when he pointed, toward us. That was fewer than there had been – Flavius Aquila's men had killed many – but there were still enough of them to give me the jeebies.

Those with bows raised them and sighted down their arrow shafts. Others dropped rocks into slings, or cocked back their arms to throw. Their chant grew louder, and the wolfry-dogs capering around their legs added their howls to the tune.

"Power your shield," said Marcus into my ear.

He sounded perfectly calm. I drew back my head so I could turn to look at him, but he wasn't looking at me. "Power your shield," he repeated, "and hang on."

One of his arms uncoiled from around my back, and instinctively I grabbed him hard before I could slip; then I pivoted up and locked my legs around his waist. Now I was holding on to him in almost the same way he'd held on to me when I'd run along the road – it seemed like years ago, but it had been less than a day.

"Good," he murmured. Then I heard his beam sizzle through the air behind me, and one of the war cries abruptly ended in a scream of pain. I matched it with my own a moment later when a rock – it must have been a rock, not an arrow, because the fiery pain faded almost immediately – hit me in my lower back. Shield, right. Mine wasn't great but it would blunt the blows, at least.

Where I was pressed tightly against Marcus my shield tried to push us apart. It felt odd, uncomfortable, but I couldn't let myself think about that. It was just me holding on, now; he had both arms out and was letting fly with all his firepower, beams and bolts and something that made an unpleasant whistling noise I only heard in the upper register of my aural. I wondered whether some of the weird pushing sensation was from his shield – if it was working now, or still blinky from the interference Guern had mentioned. I couldn't tell. If he was getting hit where I couldn't see it, he wasn't crying out. 

But mostly it was me getting hit, since he was using me as his shield. Arrows and rocks battered my back and legs. I felt each one thunk against my shield – some softly, some hard enough that I had to grit my teeth against the pain – and then fall away. 

We swiveled and tipped this way and that as we rose. Looking down made me dizzy, but when I closed my eyes, it was even worse. For a moment I thought I might empty the contents of my stomach on whatever Sealie happened to be under me. But then Marcus straightened, and he wrapped his arms around me again. The barrage of projectiles from below had stopped. I looked down; the Sealies – those who were left, I thought with grim satisfaction – were targeting the Romebots on the ground again. We must have risen out of their range. 

We hovered for a moment; then my stomach lurched again as we fell straight down. But it was only for an instant, as with a jerk we were moving again, this time not just up but sideways, downriver toward the road. "Sorry," murmured Marcus. "It's going to take a while to get the hang of this."

"You're doing fine," I gasped. "At least we're still alive."

"For now."

We attracted stares from those we flew over, and occasional shots from their weapons, as well, but we were high enough to be out of range of their hunting bows and hand-beams. Fortunately there were not many travelers on the road to the Sealie villages – it would have taken us too far out of our way to avoid it – and when it got dark, nobody noticed us silhouetted against the sky. 

By the time we got to the crossroads where we'd camped against the cliff, we were both running on the ragged edge of whatever juice we had left. Marcus set us down by our old camp, and we took turns sleeping under my cloak – the only one we had, now – until the sun rose, way too early for my liking. I would have traded my aural for another four hours of solid sleep, but I knew I wasn't going to get it, so I sat up.

Next to me, Marcus groaned, but his eyes opened, too. My legs and back ached from where the Sealies' missiles had hit, and my shoulders were stiff from hanging on to Marcus while we flew. I could tell from the way Marcus rubbed at his neck and shoulders that he was feeling just as sore; I'd bet he was as tired and as hungry as I was, too.

At least I could solve one of these problems. "I'll hunt us some breakfast," I said, pulling myself painfully upright. I bent forward to touch my toes, stretched upward to the sky. It all hurt. "You should make a fire."

"They'll see the smoke."

I shook my head. "There's a village below us, and farms. There are enough cook-fires about that one more won't matter. Besides, I don't like raw meat."

Things hurt less once I started moving. My legs and my beam gave me an unfair advantage, and soon I had three hares scorched and skinned. "More than we need," observed Marcus when I returned.

"One's for us. The others are for trade."

After we'd eaten, I left him again and went down to the village, figuring a solitary Brig wouldn't draw attention. The market was just opening for the day; it wasn't anything like the market in the Wall town, but it would be big enough for my purposes.

The vendors at the Wall market had taken my creds, but that was still Roman territory, with a link to Central. The people north of the Wall didn't have creds, so it was all bartering here, and I traded my hares for a somewhat-worn but serviceable tunic for Marcus – since he'd left his in the cave – a loaf of bread, and a flask of the same thin, sour juice we'd shared with Guern in his workshop.

"So I was thinking we could wait here until nightfall," I told Marcus, when I'd rejoined him at our camp. He'd put on the tunic and was leaning against the cliff wall which rose up behind us. Now he frowned, and shook his head.

"We're ahead of them. We should get to the Wall while we can."

"How? We're practically on the main road now. If you fly, or if I carry you, we'll attract attention we don't want."

"We're close enough. I can walk." I looked at him in disbelief, and he raised his chin, daring me to disagree. "I walked to the Sealie village. I can walk to the Wall."

I thought about reminding him just how hard it had been for him to walk to the Sealie village; that we were tired and sore from our desperate flight from that village, that he'd just had a cybermod installed, and been shot at, and that we really needed to get more rest. But he was right. The Sealies might be close behind us. We had to get back into Roman territory.

* * *

Marcus leaned heavily on me as we walked, and we were in luck: a few hours down the road a family overtook us – not Sealies, people of one of the tribes. One man of about my age was pulling a cart piled with bolts of rolled fabric – trade goods for the Wall market, I guessed – and an old woman sat among them, jouncing on the rough road. I offered to take equal turns pulling "if you'll let my lame brother ride," and after a hasty, whispered conference the family agreed.

They were Dumi, as it turned out, and I had been to one of their villages in Roman territory once on a trade mission with Beric. I didn't remember anyone's name, and it probably wouldn't have mattered if I did, being so long ago, but they warmed up to me more when I said the name of the village, and we spoke in the trade language, back and forth.

"Your brother can have a new leg at the Wall," said an older man. I guessed he was the patriarch of the family; the straight edge of a basic aux panel was barely visible under his tunic, and he had a beam that was even older than mine. None of the other members of the family had any enhances that I could see. "There are some good mechs there. Though of course you must know that, with all the work you've had done."

I couldn't tell if he was suspicious, or just making conversation. I was mostly organic, sure, but I still had more visible mods than most of the tribesmen. And Marcus didn't look much like a Romebot anymore, now that he'd dumped his metal on the road. The tunic I'd bought him hid his aux panel and the Eagle on his shoulders. But he still had his optic and his aural, and the wrist weapons and silver lines of hand augmentation. To me he looked just like any other tribesman from the villages I'd grown up in – in Roman territory. But to a man from north of the Wall, both of us were bristling with metal.

I steered the conversation to other things, mostly things I could just grunt answers to, since I was pulling the cart. After a while the Dumi family ran out of things to ask, and we plodded down the road in silence.

When I could see the northern gate to the wall-town, I thanked them again, and nodded to Marcus, who levered himself out of the cart. He'd been smart enough to pretend to be asleep the whole way down, so he wouldn't have to show his ignorance of the trade language, but when I said, very carefully and clearly, "Thank you," he did a creditable job of repeating it. Then I made a show of rubbing Marcus' leg, and the family nodded and smiled and moved on.

"Almost safe," Marcus said, as the two of us started back down the road toward the Wall. 

"Not even close," I said, and he looked at me for a moment, uncomprehending. "Guern and your father came up here to test the Eagle because they hadn't wanted Rome's skybots to see what they were doing. You think Rome's going to be all, good for you, Marcus, here's a lot of credits to develop this thing we didn't want your father to do in the first place?"

"They'd be fools not to," he said quietly, as though to himself. Then he shook his head. "But I can't trust them not to be fools."

I nodded, relieved. We were almost to the gate. "Do they know you were after the Eagle?"

"If they do, it's not because I told them. I just got a local clearance, said I was hoping to talk to someone who'd known my father. But it's not a big stretch to guess where that might lead. Not everyone at Central's a dead circuit. Someone could have connected the dots." He shook his head. "It's just hard for me not to feel as though I'm coming back out of the dangerous wilderness into comfortable civilization."

I laughed. Civilization meant different things to the Romans than to the tribes. "It's dangerous on both sides. Now we're facing a whole different kind of danger." Although the outcome would be the same if it was a beam that got us, rather than a rock or an arrow. But the Sealies had seemed scarier to Marcus. The devil you didn't know, I supposed; me, I'd had the Romebot threat hanging over my head since I was born.

We slipped in line behind a stout man carrying a pack of furs, but there was no way we could masquerade as locals, and sure enough, when we got to the guard he looked us up and down and asked for our identifications. Marcus transmitted his clearance. I held my breath.

"Yes, sir!" said the guard, and he stood aside to let us through.

The first thing we did was go to Guern's workshop locker, where Marcus transmitted the code he'd been given in the cave. The door swung open, revealing a tiny room stacked high with tools and equipment. As promised, there in the center was the vipsy. The carry-rack was piled to overflowing with things Guern must have put there: metal, wire, a cloth sack with aux circuits and wires sticking out of the top. 

"You need all that stuff to work on the Eagle?"

"Some of it," he said, frowning. "Not all of it."

I poked at the contents of the bag, thinking. Spare parts and aux circuits, like the clock circuit I'd traded in the mine a million years ago, back when I was planning my escape. Easy to carry, easy to hide, easy to trade. Guern hadn't trusted Rome any more than I did. If he thought we'd need this…

"Have you connected to Central yet?" I asked abruptly, hefting the sack in my hand. It wasn't heavy. They knew we were here now, from the guard at the gate.

"You can do it whenever you like. That's why I gave you the code."

"The code?" Then I realized he was talking about the code that he'd given me on the road while we were fleeing the Sealies, the code that would tell Central I was free. "Yeah, well, I don't have a direct link, since I'm not a citizen. Would you mind doing it?"

He gave me a half smile; he must have thought I was being ridiculously sentimental. It would have been easy enough to go to a soldier or a cred booth. "Sure, I'll do it right now." His face went blank for a moment and then his brow furrowed.

A low buzz of worry slid down my skell, collected in the pit of my stomach. But I kept my voice carefully even. "No problem, I hope."

"Oh, not with you. You're free." He looked me in the eye, smiled, but there was something off about his smile, something I couldn't discern of his expression under the optic.

"But…" I prodded. 

"I've got orders to report to Ebora directly."

Ebora was one of the bigger Roman cities and administrative centers, a couple days' travel south of the Wall. We'd passed by it on our way from C-town, but we hadn't stopped there. "Can they do that? You're not a soldier any more."

Marcus gave me a look that said that was a stupid question. Yeah, Rome did what it pleased. So maybe I was no longer his slave, but if even citizens had to jump when Rome called, I wasn't exactly free, either. I wondered if I'd have to get a direct link to Central installed.

"Well," I said, "it's too late in the day to start now. Why don't we spend the night at the inn where we did last time, and get going in the morning?"

He nodded and began to pull pieces of metal out of the pile heaped in the carry-rack. "At least I can look like a proper soldier again." 

His words cut me like a beam, but I didn't say anything. Every bit of armor he clipped back onto his flesh was a blow to my stomach. Little by little, he transformed himself from Marcus back into the Romebot. At least he still wore the tunic I'd given him – the tunic I'd traded my kill for. But it would be sliced through the first time he used the Eagle, I thought bleakly; then he'd get custom metal like Guern had said his father had used, and he'd be nothing but metal from one end to the other.

I remembered what the Sealie chief had said to me in their feasting-hall: "Is it piss that comes out of your prick, or oil?" I'd seen Marcus bare of his metal, felt his naked flesh against mine; but now, watching him, I wondered if Romebots armored even those parts, too.

"Well, Esca?" 

I jerked back to the present. Marcus had a small smile on his lips – at least I could see his lips, I thought sourly. "What?"

"There's enough metal for you. You could –"

"No," I said. My voice came out harsh and abrupt. "I'm no Romebot."

"All right," he said easily. "No, hold on to that," he added, when I started to put the bag of mods and parts back onto the carry-rack, then closed up Guern's locker again. I started to walk toward the inn, but he reached out and put his hand on my arm to stop me. "Will you come with me to Ebora?" 

I turned, and his hand slid down to mine, our fingers brushing, flesh against flesh. That was enough to snap me out of it, to remind me that it was still Marcus under that metal, and I grinned. "I go where you go, remember?" 

"Still?" 

"Still," I said firmly. His fingers were still curled around mine, and I gave them a squeeze before dropping his hand, breaking contact.

We started walking. "I feel obliged to inform you that you're no longer my slave," he said. "You don't _have_ to come with me."

"I feel obliged to inform you that you can stick it up your ass," I told him.

He leaned close and murmured into my ear. "We can discuss sticking things up my ass when we get our room."

"Well, I've got to earn my keep somehow," I said with an elaborate sigh. "Hey, that's an idea. Wonder how much I could charge." We'd arrived at the inn; I opened the door and gestured for him to precede me into the tavern.

"I don't think anyone you'll find drinking here can match –" Both his words and his steps stopped suddenly, and he stood for a moment in the middle of the doorway, blocking my view of the room. "I take that back," he said softly. 

He walked stiffly into the tavern, his head held high, looking straight ahead. I followed his gaze; his eyes were fixed on a Romebot sitting alone with his back to the wall. He had all the gear: optic, aural, armor everywhere I could see, all high-Q stuff. No grunt soldier, this one.

The Romebot raised his mug as if in a toast. "Welcome back." 

Sighing, Marcus pulled out a chair and sat at the table. "Hello, Placidus."

* * *

"So," said Placidus, eyeing me like he'd like to part me out right there in the tavern. "This is your Brig slave?"

"He is a free man," said Marcus. He put a hand on my thigh under the table, squeezed a warning.

"Ah, yes. I hadn't noticed the status change. Congratulations," he informed me, in a smooth, bored-sounding voice. He waved the barmaid over, and ordered two more mugs of beer, then looked at Marcus. I wondered if his optic could see through the tunic, to the Eagle underneath. "Are congratulations in order for you as well?"

Marcus scanned the room before answering. The tavern's customers were the same sort as had been there the night before we'd left to go north: tribesmen and traders, none too wealthy or showing a lot of metal. This Placidus stood out like a wolfry among a pack of rats, and the tables around ours were empty.

"News travels fast," he finally said. "We just came back this afternoon."

"Rome knows all," said Placidus. "Including the activity of some…former persons of interest. Just because we have no official presence north of the Wall doesn't mean we don't know what's going on there."

Guern, I thought. And the men who had worked with Flavius Aquila, who had given their lives for us only the day before. Guern had put a locator unit in my beam, so he could find us, and he'd showed us glowing dots on his monitor screen that represented his men. Had Rome been tracking them, too? Had they been tracking _me_? I was suddenly glad that I'd pushed Guern to remove the locator while we were in the cave.

The barmaid came back with mugs for Marcus and me, and when she'd set them in front of us, Placidus leaned forward, raising his own. "To the Eagle," he said; Marcus and I tipped our mugs against his, and drank.

"Well?" he said, after we put our mugs back onto the table. "You have it?"

"I have it," said Marcus, with obvious reluctance. I didn't blame him. 

"With you?" Placidus' voice rose with excitement. His eyes went to the bag I had been carrying – I'd placed it on the table when we sat – and I could almost see his optic zeroing in as though he was trying to see through the fabric. "I'm surprised you'd trust a Brig with something that…valuable."

Before I could even swivel my head, Marcus' fingers tightened again on my thigh, even harder this time. "Esca has my complete trust," he said. Placidus flicked his eyes toward me, and I stared back at him as blandly as I could manage. "But I'm not so stupid as to bring it into a place like this."

"Oh?" There was a long, expectant pause. Then Placidus sighed. "But you're not going to tell me where it is."

"That's right. It's in a safe place."

"But you'll collect it in the morning to take with us to Ebora."

"Us?" Marcus raised an eyebrow.

"Why, of course," said Placidus. His voice was so oily you could have used it to grease a mod joint. "We – that is, I and my men – are to be your escort. Why else would I be in this scrapheap of a tavern, in this dungheap of a town?"

"Because the beer's not half bad?" I asked, and he turned his optic on me as though it could bore right through tunic and metal and rip through my wires.

"How nice to be of interest to Rome again," said Marcus. "Of course I'm very thankful for your kind offer."

"Good," said Placidus, rising from the table. "I'll see you in the morning." He took one more swallow from his mug, then placed it in front of me. "Since apparently this doesn't taste like swill to the Brig palate, you might as well finish it."

"Thanks," I said cheerfully. "We Brigs do love our swill." Next to me I could hear Marcus suppress a laugh as Placidus stiffly marched out the door. "Finally. I thought he was going to come up to our room and sleep between us. Who _was_ that bucket of bolts, anyway?"

"Tribune Placidus? A very important man. It would be best to do as he says."

I stared at Marcus like he'd gone blinky, but he smiled and put his finger to his lips. Then he knocked over the mug that Placidus had left, spilling beer across the table. "Oh, shit. I guess we'll have to move."

So that was it; he thought Placidus might have left a remote aural to spy on us. My estimation of the trouble we were in went up a notch as I rose to follow Marcus across the room to another table. There were plenty of empty ones, and more went empty as we approached. Nobody wanted to accidentally piss off a Romebot, and Marcus looked, in his way, almost as forbidding as Placidus had.

"He actually _is_ an important man," Marcus told me after we'd chosen our new table and the barmaid had brought us bowls of stew and a loaf of bread. "Not as important as he would like to be, though."

"Was he in your army unit?"

"He's no soldier – that's a political job, Tribune. But his men are trained soldiers. And I suspect their orders are just as military as his are political."

"I noticed you didn't tell him…." Even though we'd moved across the room and our voices were low, lost in the general noise of tavern conversation and clinks of tableware and beer mugs, I didn't want to finish the sentence out loud. 

"No." Marcus' smile was thin and bitter. "You were right, what you said at the gate. I guess I had it in my head that Rome would be grateful to me. That bringing back the Eagle would make up for my father losing it, and they'd give me a new lab, for new tech."

"They still might. They're obviously interested in it."

"Interested in the Eagle, yeah. Interested in me?" He shrugged. "Having Placidus come fetch us sends a different message."

I nodded. I'd heard the veiled threat in the way Placidus mentioned his men and his mission. "Escort, or guard?"

"We'll find out tomorrow. Finish eating – we've got to get to work."

"Work?" 

He grinned at me. "How'd you like to be a mech?"

* * *

"Guern's repair took care of most of the interference problem, but my shields still can't operate full-strength while I'm flying," Marcus said to me as we spread out the contents of the parts sack across the bed in our room. It was a small room, with one narrow bed, a nightstand, and a single chair. The innkeeper had first shown us to a nicer, larger room, but Marcus, suspicious that he might have been bribed to allow Placidus to place a spy device, had invented a reason it was unacceptable. This one, barely bigger than Guern's storage locker, had supposedly been the last room available. 

"You weren't as bruised as I was after that flight from the Sealies. And my shields were a hundred percent."

"You took most of the hits," he informed me cheerfully. "Anyway, that was against projectiles. From the way our shields interacted I could tell I didn't want to get hit with an energy weapon. And the soldiers in Placidus' unit are going to have disruptors and beams, not bows and arrows."

"I said I'd face the Sealies with you," I grumbled. "Not the whole fucking Romebot army."

"It's not going to be the whole fucking Romebot army. Twenty men, I'm guessing. Not so many as to frighten us into running, but enough that they think we won't be able to."

"Are we going to run?"

"Maybe." Marcus picked up several small curved pieces of metal and held them up one by one to the light. I couldn't tell what he was looking at, or looking for, but he chose one and set it aside. Next came wires, molded into spirals; three of them were placed next to the curved metal plate, and the rest returned to the heap. He looked up at me. "Are you going to ask if we'll be able to?"

I shook my head. "Twenty of them. Two of us. Not good odds."

"No. But not impossible ones."

"I was running from the mines when they caught me, trying to make the edge colonies. There were three of them – had me down before I could do a damn thing." I'd told him the story before, when he'd asked how I'd ended up in the Arena. "Only three, and they took me."

"Your legs were disabled," he reminded me. He picked a last bit of something out of the pile of metal on the bed, then swept the rest back into the bag.

I shrugged. "Maybe I can outrun a beam now, maybe not. And if one of them has good legs, too, there goes my advantage. My shields aren't as high Q as their beams."

"No," he agreed. "But it's me they're going to be after. And none of them is going to have wings." He scooped up the pieces he'd chosen from the parts Guern had left us and laid them out in a line across the nightstand, then moved the chair next to it and straddled it backwards, so his chest rested against the chair's high back. He pulled off his tunic and dropped it on the floor beside him.

It still looked strange to me, the metal T of the Eagle across his shoulders. As I watched, he flexed his arms, slid the extensions out and back in again. His flesh was reddened where it met the metal edges of the mod; I wonder how long it would take to fully integrate. It wouldn't kill him, if the Romans in Ebora removed it, but I'd bet it would hurt like a son of a bitch.

And I'd bet that the physical pain would pale in comparison to the emotional pain of loss. I had howled with despair when they'd disabled my leg mods in the mine, and they only made me faster and stronger – they didn't give me a whole new ability. With the Eagle, Marcus could fly. He'd redeemed his father's vision and was confident he could carry it out again. If Rome took it away, he'd be crushed.

I pressed the recessed spot at the base of Marcus' neck and the small panel slid open. Underneath was a bewildering maze of wires and circuits. "Okay," I said. "What do I do?"

Slowly, patiently, Marcus directed my hands. I described to him what I saw – a pair of red wires running parallel to a group of three black ones, a twist of metal around a translucent tube filled with a viscous-looking liquid, a fine lattice of silvery tendrils enclosing a dull black cube. He told me which wires to clip the spirals around and where to slide the metal plates. My fingers felt big and clumsy. Guern's mods would have made easy work of it, but I was terrified I'd accidentally push something out of alignment or crush a delicate connector.

It took longer than I expected, and my hands were shaking with the effort by the time Marcus finally told me to close the panel. He stood and stretched, rolling his shoulders. "I wish we could test it."

"You could fly up to the ceiling."

"I don't think I have the control." But he tried anyway, and bonked his head on the ceiling for his trouble. In a way I was glad, because the prospect of zapping him with my beam scared the shit out of me. If he'd guessed wrong about what needed to be modified, or if I'd screwed up when I'd put the parts in, at best his shields would be damaged and at worst, _he_ would be. Neither of which was something we wanted right now, when we might have to fight twenty Romebots the next day.

Which I hoped we would not have to do. But we discussed plans into the night, just in case. What would tip us off that we might be in trouble. What we could do, if we were. Marcus was right: the odds weren't good, but they weren't impossible. We'd stolen the Eagle back from the Sealies; if we had to, we'd steal it from Rome.

That would be a big step, and an irrevocable one. And maybe it wouldn't be necessary. We hadn't done anything illegal, Marcus had told me; we'd done all the adminwork and arranged all the clearances, and even if he wasn't a soldier any more, he was a citizen, and Rome couldn't treat him the way they could treat me. Maybe the only reason they'd sent Placidus was because they really did want to protect Marcus and the Eagle; maybe they _would_ give him a lab and let him work on new tech. 

But if they didn't, we would be ready. 

* * *

We were woken by banging on our door early in the morning. We unwrapped ourselves from each other, and Marcus put on his tunic and his metal. Watching him, I almost wished I had taken the extra metal from the back of the vipsy; it would be easier to face the Romebots in their own uniform.

It was Placidus, of course, and he looked at us sourly when we opened the door. "I've got bread and cheese to take with us. My men are in the courtyard. We need to hit the road."

"We've got to get something first," said Marcus. He didn't seem to be hurrying, so I didn't either.

Placidus snorted. "You weren't stupid enough to install it, were you?"

Marcus glanced deliberately at the sack of parts, which I'd slung over one shoulder, then looked back at Placidus. "Of course not. It's blinky anyway. The Sealies just ripped it out of his flesh." His voice never wavered. "I've got to get a good mech to look at it."

"Plenty of mechs in Ebora."

"And to get there, I need my vipsy. My transport."

"We can take you both on a lifter," said Placidus carelessly. I couldn't suppress a shudder. I remembered the soldiers hitting me with the disruptor and taking me on the lifter to the Arena like it was happening all over again. I wondered if I could run past Placidus through the open door, if I could make it out of the inn. I could grab Marcus, like I had in the Sealie village, and we could run.

"I'm taking my vipsy," said Marcus, and I forced myself to relax. His voice was pleasant but firm, and for a moment he and Placidus looked at each other like they were facing off in the Arena.

Finally Placidus shrugged. "Fine. But hurry up. I'll come with you."

Marcus and I exchanged a quick glance as we followed Placidus down the stairs and out of the inn. I knew the alarms were going off in his circuits just like they were going off in mine, amped and buzzing for fight or flight. 

Placidus nodded to his men, who stood at attention just outside the inn, and four of them peeled off to join us as we headed for Guern's locker. Marcus led at a painful pace that was even slower than usual. Then the Romebots stood aside as Marcus transmitted the locker key and opened the door.

"Son of a bitch," I murmured.

"Easy, Esca," said Marcus. But I could hear the barely-restrained fury in his voice as we looked at the jumbled wreckage that yesterday had been neat piles of tools and metal. I didn't see anything obviously broken – not that I would be able to tell – but the mess would take Guern days to sort through. Assuming Guern hadn't gone black at the cave, been parted out by the Sealies, his fingers taken for jewelry and his screens and cutters taken for the pillar outside their feasting-hall. 

At least the vipsy was still there, and when Marcus locked onto its frequency it responded. Placidus, who had been gazing off into the distance, turned his head at the motion. "Your friend isn't very tidy, I see."

"I must not have closed it properly last night," said Marcus. His voice was almost casual, though I wasn't fooled. I suspected Placidus wasn't, either. "Someone got in."

"Oh, dear. Did anything get taken?"

"Nothing important."

I must have taken an unconscious step forward, for Marcus' fingers wrapped around my arm, holding me in place. But I wanted to punch Placidus hard, right in the smooth metal of his faceplate. That fucking Romebot had overridden the code and ransacked the locker, I was sure of it.

And it had been Marcus who had made it happen; it was his fault Guern's equipment was scattered in heaps on the floor. He'd lied to Placidus, told him we didn't have the Eagle with us. They wouldn't have broken into our room.

But as I thought about it, I realized he'd done it deliberately. It had been a trap, and Placidus had sprung it. And all this talk was an elaborate dance, because there was no fucking way Placidus did not know that Marcus knew what he'd done. I'd bet he also knew that the Eagle was clicked into Marcus' shoulders. I wondered whether he believed what Marcus had said, that the Eagle was too blinky to use.

If he didn't, we'd have a harder time escaping. Because now we both knew, Marcus and I, that we'd have to escape. I moved a little closer to Marcus, placing a hand lightly on his shoulder, but he frowned and stepped away. I understood: not yet. We hadn't planned to do it from here, anyway; here between the walls of the Wall-village, I couldn't run to safety, and if he carried me we wouldn't be able to fly high enough fast enough to get away from Placidus and his men.

We just had to get south of the Wall. That was it. Then we could flee for the edge colonies. I let out my breath and tried to amp down my jitters. We could do this.

Marcus closed up Guern's locker again and straddled the vipsy. "All right, we're ready."

The rest of Placidus' men fell into formation around us as we made for the south gate. The market square was empty this early in the morning, the stalls not yet assembled for the day's trading, so there was plenty of room for them to march six abreast. We were in the second rank, with two men to my left and Placidus and another Romebot to Marcus' right. The narrow gate forced us to into a single file, but the first soldiers through waited on either side and surrounded us again as soon as we were on the road. It was obvious to me that they were boxing us in, trying to keep us from bolting.

The road cut a straight strip through the gently hilly terrain, and the soldiers filled it from side to side. Nobody else was out this early; I wondered what would happen if we encountered another patrol, or northbound traders. The way the Romebots were marching, heads pointed straight ahead and feet perfectly aligned, I guessed they might run over anyone unlucky enough to think they deserved any part of the road.

We walked south for maybe an hour. Marcus was chatting with Placidus, telling him a highly expurgated version of what we'd done in the Sealie territory. In fact, it pretty much had nothing in common with the truth, but every so often he'd turn to me and say something like, "Do you remember that Sealie's name, the one who was leading the hunting party?" or "They had tech like you wouldn't believe, all just decorating their houses, right, Esca?" I'd grunt an answer, or nod, and he'd turn back to Placidus and add, "Of course every bit of it had gone blinky, but if we could just get our mechs on that stuff, we'd have a serious stockpile."

And then, as we crossed a small stream and the road began to climb slowly toward the crest of the next hill, Marcus turned to me and said, "Reminds me of that place with the cave, don't you think?"

"Yeah," I said. Then I powered my shields, turned away from Marcus, and took off running.

I could hear shouts behind me, and the crackle of energy, and metal on metal, but I couldn't afford the time to look back. I had to trust that Marcus had carried out his part of the plan. After giving me the signal and getting my response he was to toggle the vipsy to max speed forward, sending it crashing into the Romebots ahead of him, while he powered the Eagle hard vertical and as fast as possible. Three distractions, three different directions: that was our idea. But we both knew the Romebots would be focused on him.

I tried not to worry about the mech job I'd done the previous night. All those skinny wires and complicated parts, all the things that could have gone wrong. Marcus had told me what to do, and I'd done it as well as I could. Either his shields would work while he flew, or they wouldn't. 

At least by going straight up, he would be able to get out of range more quickly. My own shields could take only so many bolts and beams, and every bit of juice I used to keep them going was power I couldn't turn into speed. But I couldn't afford to drop them, just as I knew I couldn't afford to drop the sack of parts and circuits that Guern had left us. If I zig-zagged like I'd done in the arena, I'd be a harder target to hit, but if any of the soldiers had cybermod legs like mine, they'd catch me. So I just amped my legs as much as I dared, and tried to get out of range as fast as possible.

I counted the hits. Three in rapid succession just after I'd bolted, beams that sizzled against my shields with unpleasant grating sensations. Then came the unmistakable cold emptiness of a disruptor; my shields wavered, and I almost stumbled as my circuits dipped and I began to lose sensation in my legs, but I was out of its range, and everything came back on-line in a millisec. A beam battered at my legs. Another glanced off my shoulder. A projectile hit me square in the center of my back, but compared to the barrage I'd endured from the Sealies it was nothing.

The hits came more slowly, and mostly they were weakening, or anyway, it seemed like it to me. And that meant I was getting out of range of even the longest beams, so I dared a quick glance over my shoulder. Three Romebots chased me; two of them were well back and slowing – their cybermod legs were lower Q – but one was keeping pace pretty well. No, gaining on me, I realized when I looked back again, and my blood and oil ran cold.

It was a cruel balance, a simple equation, and I was on the losing side. My shields – and the power hits I took every time they saved me from his beam – were sucking power I needed to run. He was the only one close enough to zap me effectively, but his beam took his own power, slowed his chase. 

But he only lost power when he zapped me. My shields drained a little of my juice all the time, and more when they fended off his beam. I lost more; he ran faster. If he kept coming, he'd catch me.

I concentrated on keeping my speed up and watching the rough ground. If I tripped and fell, I'd be parted out before I knew what hit me. I didn't risk looking back again until I hit a stretch of smooth, bare dirt with no obstacles ahead.

The Romebot was even closer; closer than he'd been, closer than I'd thought he'd be by now. He pursued me with a soldier's single-mindedness, just one circuit in the machine that was Rome. A part of Rome, he was, just as Marcus had once promised me I'd be. Now we were trying to get apart from Rome, and I was beginning to doubt we'd make it. 

I faced forward again and ran, counting off the seconds to myself, trying to calculate how fast the Romebot was running, how quickly he was gaining on me. He zapped me again, and pain spread through my shoulder where his beam hit. As he closed the distance between us, his weapons became more effective, and my shields were weakening from the assault.

A bolt hit me hard on the left leg, causing me to stumble. Then, before I could regain my balance, he zapped me again – and I fell to my knees. This was it, then. He'd be on me by the time I climbed to my feet and took off running again, so instead I twisted, facing the Romebot as he charged toward me and hammering him with all the juice I could pour through my beam. 

His shields were still at full strength, so he didn't even break stride even as they glowed with the work of dissipating my attack. He didn't zap me again, though. He'd probably been instructed to bring me in disabled but undamaged; I guessed he was just waiting to get within disruptor range. 

Fortunately for me, Marcus got there first. 

I'd been looking at the Romebot, not at the sky, but out of the corner of my eye I could see something swooping down from high above, and my heart jumped. I forced myself not to tilt my head, or even to give Marcus away by the expression on my face; Marcus blasted away with both his weapons, and the combined effect of his assault and mine punched right through the Romebot's shields and sent him crashing to the ground.

"Let's get out of here," said Marcus, as he made his own slightly-more-graceful landing next to me. His tunic was in tatters where the wings of the Eagle had extended out of his shoulders, and his hair was wind-blown and messy, and he was grinning. I threw my arms around him, and we took off again. The fallen Romebot sent a barrage of energy in our direction. The bolt hit Marcus square on the back. His shields glowed, but they held steady, and he lifted us up and away. 

* * *

I woke to a hand on my shoulder, and the last red rays of sunlight before darkness. We'd landed on a bare-topped hill far from any city or even any road, eaten what was left of the rations Placidus had given us that morning, and taken turns sleeping until sunset. It would be safer to travel after dark, we'd agreed. We'd seen two skybots in the first hour of our cross-country flight, and shot both of them down. A couple of hours later, we saw another, which skittered away before it got into range. After that, nothing.

"No skybots," Marcus said, as I swiveled my neck to scan the darkening sky.

"It's pretty obvious we're headed for the edge colonies. Nothing they can do about it unless we land near a road."

"I tried to connect," said Marcus. "They've cut my link." He sounded bitter but resigned; I think he had still hoped, up until the very last minute, that Rome would cheer him as a hero. But not any more. 

"I've never had one," I said. "Look, Marcus, we don't need creds. I can hunt. We can trade the circuits Guern gave us. The metal he left for you. We don't need Rome."

He got to his feet and held out his hand to pull me up. "Easy for you to say, Brig. I've always been a Roman. I'm not sure what to do without Rome."

"Lots of options." I stretched my arms and legs, shaking out the last bit of fatigue. "What with my legs and your wings, I bet we'd be pretty useful to the edge colony rebels. We could join the fight against Rome. But if you've had enough of fighting, we could trade some of our goods, start up the lab you've always wanted. You can work on new tech there. Or," I added, forestalling the objection I knew was coming, "if you think they're not going to have the resources, we can sell everything we've got and jump a ship. Go to New Gaul, maybe. Start over."

"Sell everything we've got," he repeated. "Not our mods?"

"Not my legs, not your Eagle. But it's not cheap to get off the rock. It might take everything else."

"Do they wear metal on New Gaul?" he asked. With his right hand he stroked the armor on his left arm, just above the elbow. It was almost a caress. 

"The Romebots probably do. The tribesmen, probably not, just like here." I reached for his right hand and unfolded his fingers from the metal, folded my own fingers through his. "I like you better without it."

"Do you," he murmured. He pulled me close and kissed me. "I suppose could get used to going bare." Then he squeezed my hand. "Ready to go?"

"Sure," I said. I dropped his hand so I could wrap my arms around him. The Eagle on his shoulder hummed and extended. "So, where are we going?"

He grinned at me. "You decide." Then he spread his wings and we were flying again, flying away from Rome and towards the brightening stars.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whew! I hope you all enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it! Thanks to all of you who gave feedback and encouragement during the process, especially my beta reader altri_uccelli who made this a much better story.
> 
> All feedback is loved!


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